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Leighton, Joseph Alexander, 
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Religion and the mind of 
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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
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https://archive.org/details/religionmindofto0O0leig 


RELIGION AND THE 
MIND OF TO-DAY 





RELIGION AND THE 
MIND OF TO- DAY... 


Rt DF i RG & 





BY oh ar 
OL oes 
JOSEPH ALEXANDER “LEIGHTON, Pu.D., LES Leo 


PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY; 
AUTHOR OF “THE FIELD OF PHILOSOPHY,” 
‘“‘MAN AND THE COSMOS, ETC. 





D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 


NEW YORK LONDON 
1924 


Copyricut, 1924, By 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


PREFACE 


The present book is the outcome of many years’ read- 
ing and reflection on the problems that arise where the 
spirit of scientific inquiry and the spirit of religious 
faith meet together. From my early youth I have been 
interested in religion. After several years of college 
work, chiefly in the natural sciences, I turned my atten- 
tion to the study of philosophy and the history of religion. 
As a teacher of philosophy I have had constant oppor- 
tunity to touch on those problems that are common to 
philosophy and theology. I have for a number of years 
been convinced that, just as Western civilization is in 
process of rapid change and undergoing reconstruction, 
so it 1s with its religion. No civilization has ever existed 
without a religion, and I do not believe that any future 
civilization will be devoid of religion. JI am convinced, 
for reasons that I have stated briefly in the following 
chapters, that the future religion of Western Civilization 
cannot afford to reject the spiritual values of Jesus and 
his greatest interpreters. I hold that Jesus Christ and 
the spiritual motives and standards emanating from Him 
embody the high-water mark of ethical and religious in- 
sight, thus far. 

But I should be false to my own conviction as to the 
urgent necessity of a religious reformation to guide and 
inspire the new civilization that is now coming into being, 
if I failed to show how to apply the guiding principles 


Vv 


vi PREFACE 


of our scientific culture to the reconstruction of our in- 
herited religion and social ethics. The new civilization 
will have a religion. But it must be a religion which 
unites the exalted spiritual motives and principles of the 
Mighty Founder of Christianity with the scientific 
spirit. The Protestant Reformation was a work half-done 
because the Reformers had not imbibed the spirit of the 
new science—of the mightiest intellectual revolution in 
human history. It is often said that there is no conflict 
between Science and Religion. This statement is true, if 
one means by Religion that temper of soul inculeated in 
the ethical sayings and deeds of Jesus; or even simply an 
attitude of reverent communion with the Universal Spirit. 
It is thoroughly false and mischievous—it is crying 
“Peace,” where there can be no peace—if it means that 
there is no conflict between Science and the antiquated 
cosmologies, theologies, psychologies, ethics, and doctrines 
of salvation which have been built up around the sublime 
human figure of the prophet of Nazareth until his human 
lineaments have been effaced. 

This book is a humble contribution towards the New 
Reformation, a modest prelude to the dawn of a new 
cultural synthesis which will mean a new religious syn- 
thesis, a new ethical synthesis and a new social synthesis 
—one in which the light of science will be vivified and 
energized by the moral and humane values implicit in the 
works of Jesus and his greatest disciples; but a synthesis 
which will include the ethical and social implications of 
our new knowledge of man, nature and their interrelations 
which are the fruits of science. I reserve the treatment 
of the specific ethical implications of science for a later 
work. We are now in the midst of a new Renaissance of 


PREFACE vii 


the human spirit. It must be accompanied by a new 
Reformation. 

I have aimed, in what follows, at an outline of a phi- 
losophy of religion. I have sought to give, in summary 
fashion, viewpoints from which to examine the central 
problems and to suggest to my readers lines of reflection, 
rather than to write exhaustively. In another and much 
larger work, Man and the Cosmos, I have stated and 
argued quite fully, in the light of present-day science and 
philosophy, the philosophical foundations on which the 
views concisely presented herein are based. The present 
work is thus the application of a philosophy already 
developed to the main problems of a religious and Chris- 
tian outlook on life and the world. On the other hand, 
I have not tried to write a primer of the subject but to 
write concisely and to the point and to leave the further 
applications to the reader’s thought. 

I have no desire to take part in the acrimonious con- 
troversies of the moment, conducted, as they are so often, 
on the level of prescientific imagery rather than by a 
thoughtful weighing of the issues at stake. I have written 
only for those who are in doubt and are seeking their way 
with open mind and thoughtful candor through the cul- 
tural and spiritual confusions of the present time. T'o 
those whose minds are firmly anchored either in a tradi- 
tional dogmatic creed or in dogmatic negations I have 
nothing to say. 

The more immediate circumstances of this book’s origin 
will perhaps explain its scope and its limits. I have, at 
various times, been asked to give addresses on many of 
the themes included in the present work. At the invita- 
tion of the Editor of the Churchman, I contributed, dur- 


Vill PREFACE 


ing the years 1923 and 1924, two series of articles on the 
general topic, Religion and the Mind of To-day and The 
Problems of Religion and Culture. The articles are now 
republished here, with a number of alterations and addi- 
tions, but with no material changes. The chapter on ““The 
Recrudescence of Paganism” is a reprint of an address 
given before the New York State Conference of Religion 
in 1909 and published in the proceedings of the Con- 
ference. 

I wish to express my thanks to the many hearers of my 
addresses and readers of my articles who have shown so 
warm an interest in persuading me to put the material 
into book form. I am also indebted to my publishers for 
their interest in the same. 

To all who love their fellows and love truth with such 
devotion that they have faith that the knowledge of truth 
which makes men free is an essential constituent of the 
Highest Good for men, I dedicate this book. It reflects, 
in outline, the story of my own quest for light on the 
supreme questions of human conduct and human destiny. 


J. As, 


PREFACE 


CHAPTER 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
cola AR: Sippel Ne hee Raat cP ala Ie Sa a A Re lt ee 5 
PART I 
RELIGION AND CULTURE TO-DAY 

EVV NT PUMRIGION ML SLi Che iiic ers cic oroen one e ate nen gre 3 
. WoRLD-VIEWS AND RELIGIOUS VALUES.......... 15 
PE SCLENCIO AND. LRADITIONALISM, c's oh cle ek mille ed 24 
. Tut RECRUDESCENCE OF PAGANISM.............. 38 
. Tae CuLTuRAL FUNCTION oF RELIGION.......... od 


PART, I 


a 


THE RELIGION OF JESUS 


. Tue KinGpom oF GoD AND THE ErHIcs or WORLDLY 


REDDER CO ote en a Ul te aera Ve Acti or ee 65 

. EraicAL HUMANISM AND THE E\THICS OF JESUS..... 76 
. SociaAL ETHIcS AND THE TEACHINGS oF JESUS.... 83 
RN EWE SCHE AND 1 A BSUS: oc hae cuales suaamaha yaa avin oa 97 
Tue Heart or Jesus’ RELIGION... 02.0.5. Me ooo. 106 
RELIGION@AND, MORALS! 5. Sn VS Onesie trek ee 118 

Ha BSUS Ps ND IUCCLESIASTICIBMS, a) et Uutteinga dere 128 
.,History, PERSONALITY AND TRUTH............5. 133 
. APOTHEOSIS AND INCARNATION. ..............0.-- 143 
CREEDS AS SPIRITUAL SYMBOLS...............-.. 160 


ix 


CHAPTER 


XVI. 
XVII. 
XVIII. 
XIX. 
Xo 
XXT. 
XXII. 
XXII. 
XXIV. 
XXY. 
XXXVI. 
XXVII. 
XXVITI. 
XXIX. 
XXX. 
XXXI. 


CONTENTS 


PART III 


THE VALIDITY OF RELIGION 


PAGE 
A CRITERION FOR THE EVALUATION OF ReE.Licions. 173 
SCIENCE AND) IRELIGBOND thi cinerea Mun sstomet eae 194 _ 
NATURAL CAUSATION AND MIRACLES............. 202 
WHAT ATTE NTS ON nO Ee Re ei ea a 218 
POETRY) AND) RELIGION Onno eee eee 226 
A CORMATTIVE (UNIVERSE ¢ psis 2 ee ie tate ees 241 
SPIRIT, AND (TH: COSMOB: 171. sae a alae eee 247 
MATTER AND | OPIRIT. Oe) oil i ene en 255 
Lae pea lon Gopi ae i eae ora 267 
Gop, THt HoMELAND oF SPIRITUAL VALUES..... 284 
Moraut Evin AND Morau FREEDOM............. 292 
‘THE PROBLEM. ‘OF | HIVIT sutra a te ee 306 
PRAVRR sa a IPA SC 318 
IMMORTALITY. “AND) SCLHNCE. Ds Sok CO ae oes 325 
RELIGION AND SocIAL PROGRESS................ 332 
RELIGION AND THE STATE........ Cre Moker. 347 


BIBLIOGRAPHY sha 0 No i Set ee anaes 363 


PART I 


i 


RELIGION AND CULTURE 








RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


CHAPTER I 
WHAT RELIGION Is 


Many definitions have been given of the nature or es- 
sence of religion. These definitions have been framed 
from various points of view. Jeligion has been defined 
in psychological terms as primarily an attitude of feeling, 
or volition, or thought. Schleiermacher’s famous state- 
ment that the essence of religion is a feeling of dependence 
on the Infinite, a sense and taste for the Infinite, illus- 
trates well the definition of religion as feeling. Hegel’s 
notion that religion consists in the apprehension, through 
representation or pictorial idea, of man’s union with the 
Infinite illustrates the method of defining religion in intel- 
lectual terms. Many thinkers have defined religion as 
consisting in a practical, a volitional attitude towards 
Higher Powers, which aims at getting something from 
them or gaining control or power. All these modes of 
definition have some truth, but all are one-sided. 

Religion, whatever else it may involve, means at least 
a reaction of the entire human person to the problems and 
values and aims of life. This total reaction or attitude 
may, and normally does, have its roots in feeling, since 

3 


4 .RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


feeling is the fundamental matrix or stuff of man’s psychi- 
eal life. And it is quite as true that man is a being who 
thinks—who frames and guides himself by images and 
general ideas or concepts—as it is that he feels. The 
objects towards or away from which his feelings point are 
pictured or imagined, and at a higher level are thought 
in conceptual terms. The religious attitude is one of 
feeling directed either towards Higher Powers or a single 
Higher Power, believed to be able to control the forces 
of nature and to determine human destiny. And the 
Higher Power, the Transcendent Being, the “Determiner 
of Destiny” (J. B. Pratt’s phrase) is either pictured or 
thought conceptually as being and working in some sort 
of dynamic relationship to both man and nature. The 
feelings and the notions of the beings towards which the 
feelings are directed lead man inevitably to act and to 
refrain from action in accordance with his _ beliefs. 
Therefore, we can say, psychologically, that religion al- 
ways involves a belief in the existence of either several 
Higher Powers or of one Higher Power which controls 
the universe and with whom man can enter into personal 
relations—can fear or reverence, obey or disobey; and 
who will bestow some good on the faithful. Religion is 
the explicit belief in a Supreme Reality who is the Foun- 
tain of All Good. Religion always involves a specific way 
of conduct which brings man into right relation with the 
Supreme Reality. 

Religion then always involves the following elements: 
(1) Conviction or judgment as to what are the highest, 
most satisfying and most lasting goods of life. Man 
would have no religion if he made no distinction between 
values or goods, if he put all aspects of his life on the 


WHAT RELIGION IS 5 


same level. He must have a scale of life values. He 
must regard some goods and, therefore, the activities and 
experiences involved in procuring these goods, as superior 
to others. But (2) if he could, without hindrance or 
aid, satisfy all his cravings for the most permanent and 
most desirable goods by the technical manipulation of 
physical forces and social human forces, he would have 
no need of a religion. Therefore, religion springs from 
the recognition of the actual failures, dissatisfactions, dis- 
harmonies, of everyday existence as contrasted with its 
conceivable permanent goods. Religion only springs up 
in the soul of man when he discovers the discrepancy be- 
tween what he would be and what he is, The most hope- 
lessly irreligious attitude is that of completely smug sat- 
isfaction: ‘‘Lord, I thank thee that I am not as other 
men are.” ‘The most religious attitude is that of com- 
plete submission to the Transcendent Being who is the 
bearer of the Supreme Values: “Not my will, but thine 
be done.” “Lord, be merciful to me a sinner.” (3) The 
belief in the Higher Power who is the Source and Sus- 
tainer of the Highest Values involves acts on the part of 
the believer—acts of worship, sacrifice, prayer, obedience. 

The supreme paradox and problem of human life lies 
in the fact that man is ever spurred on by the vision of 
Higher Values, of a Supreme Good which, if it possessed 
him freely, would make his life wholly satisfying; 
whereas, in fact, he is ever falling short of the attainment 
and enjoyment of the Good. Herein lies the distinction 
between ethics and religion. Ethics is the doctrine of the 
good, of the Supreme Values of life. Religion is the 
faith that these values are eternally realized in the Su- 
preme Reality, that God is the Perfect Fulfillment, the 


6 RELIGION. AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


Eternal Source and Conservator of the true and perma- 
nent values of life. If we take personality as the best 
name for the spiritual reality which encompasses, con- 
tains and sustains all the really worthful values of life, 
then we can say that the imperfectly developing person- 
ality of man seeks fruition in the Perfect Personality 
of God. All these.terms are hints thrown out at a great 
mystery. But it is plain, on the one hand, that man 
everywhere and always, from the Australian savage to 
the philosopher, has some vision of a best life—the life 
of superior value for him and his. And it is plain, on the 
other hand, that man always is compelled to recognize his 
own failure to realize and hold these values without aid 
from above and beyond. It seems to me equally valid to 
say that man must believe that somehow the life of 
highest value will triumph and endure. And this faith, 
this affirmation, together with the attitudes of feeling 
(reverence, humility) that accompany it, and the acts that 
follow from it (worship, prayer, obedience), constitute 
the practical side of religion. The contents of the most 
worthful life, the life of highest values, are ethical. Re- 
ligion is the affirmation that this life is supreme, that it 
rules and will endure through all the changes and chances 
of the natural order and the human order. 

The differences between religions, the differences be- 
tween adherents of the same organized or institutional 
religion, the differences in an individual’s religious atti- 
tude at different stages in his earthly career: all are de- 
termined by differing estimates as to the true values of 
hfe. These differences in the relative values assigned to 
a man’s goods are determined by the native individuality 
of man as modified by his natural and cultural environ- 


WHAT RELIGION IS 7 


ments. The influence of social culture on the individual 
and the group becomes more potent with the advance of 
civilization in its power of control over nature and the 
accumulation of cultural activities and interests. Cul- 
tural life is supernatural, though it develops from the 
bosom of the natural cosmos. The difference between the 
religion of an Australian savage and that of the late 
Josiah Royce (a great religious philosopher) was due in 
part to the fact that Royce and the savage were born with 
different mentalities, but even more was it due to the 
fact that Royce was the heir of world culture, whereas 
the savage, even though by comparison with his fellows 
an Australian Royce, was heir to a poor culture. 

The distinction between natural and revealed religion 
will not hold. All religion is natural, in the sense that 
it is the natural outcome of man’s struggle towards a 
life which embodies the highest, most comprehensive and 
consistent values that he can feel, conceive and seek. All 
religion is revealed, in the sense that it is the result of 
the interplay of the human spirit, which cannot be sated 
by the things of this world, with the deep and mysterious 
pulse of the Universal Life. 

All religions that have furthered the ethical and spir- 
itual development of man are revelations of man’s higher 
possibilities as realized in intercourse with the nature of 
the universe as a whole. The Christian religion (the re- 
ligion emanating from Jesus Christ and his apostles) is 
the highest known religion; since through Jesus there 
was revealed in concrete personal shape, not only the 
highest and fullest human spirituality, but there were 
released and strengthened the noblest and strongest mo- 
tives for the realization of man’s moral and spiritual 


8 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


capacities. If Jesus be supreme among the sons of men 
in the moral and spiritual order, then He is the most 
adequate revealer of what man may become under his 
leadership. He is not the only revealer, but he is the 
richest and most adequate revealer of the spiritual capaci- 
ties of man. Surely this is enough. We cannot assert, 
in the face of comparative spiritual history, that Chris- 
tianity, in any of its manifold forms hitherto, is the abso- 
lute religion, but we can assert that Jesus sets the high- 
water mark of spiritual self-fulfillment for man. And 
if mau ever rises to nobler heights than the teaching and 
person of Jesus guides and inspires him towards, it will 
be through Jesus. J am unable to conceive how man can 
transcend the exalted moral and spiritual quality of Jesus. 
But if he should he will do so in the spirit of Jesus. 
“T have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot | 
bear to hear them now.” ‘‘Howbeit, when He the Spirit 
of Truth is come, He will lead you into all the truth.” 
“Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you 
free.” 

Spiritual religion will not cease to be Jesuanic, though 
it may transcend all existing forms of Christianity. Re- 
ligion, therefore, changes, but it cannot die. It ebbs and 
flows with the whole stream of human culture, of which 
it is the crowning expression and interpretation. As cul- 
tures sicken and die, to be reborn in transmuted form, 
so with religion. So long as man lives so long will he 
seek to rear fairer mansions for his insatiate and endur- 
ing spirit to dwell in. So long will he live by every word 
that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. So long will 
he embody forth, in images and concepts, ideals of fairer, 
fuller, more harmonious goods; and, in the face of con- 


WHAT RELIGION IS 9 


travening facts, in the face of failure and disappointment, 
will he in faith affirm the supremacy of spiritual values 
over the brute forces of nature; over his own sin, stupid- 
ity and error. Until man becomes either a lotos eater or 
a god he will believe and pray and worship. So long as 
man remains man, “‘who partly is and wholly hopes to 
be,” he will be incurably religious. 

As man changes in his whole culture, so does he change 
in his scale of spiritual values, in his estimates of the 
true goods of life. But always, in religion, he affirms 
his faith in the reality and supremacy, the cosmic stand- 
ing, of the highest values of life. When culture decays, | 
religion decays. When culture flourishes, religion flour- 
ishes. When the forms of culture decay, religion will 
afford a refuge and consolation. When other forms of 
culture become too worldly, too materialistic, religion may 
rebuke and chasten them. For religion, growing out of 
a human culture, points man beyond all wordly goods to 
the Perfect and Transcendent in which alone there is 
rest and peace for his soul. An institutional or organized 
religion, which is accepted by any considerable group and 
which continues for a time to hold sway over that group, 
is the concentrated expression of a whole social moral 
culture. Its commands and prohibitions, its ideals of 
conduct and personality, its ceremonies and organization, 
its very conceptions of man, nature, God, destiny, salva- 
tion, are determined by the social culture in which it 
lives. 

The ethics of medieval Catholic Christendom differ 
from the ethics of Calvinistic Puritanism, because of the 
differences in the whole organization of culture. The 
New Testament idea of God differs from that of St. 


10 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


Augustine and his followers for the same reason. The 
idea of God held to-day by one nurtured in the scientific 
spirit and imbued with the ideas of social democracy 
differs from both. Of course we must allow for the influ- 
ence of great religious geniuses who sum up and bring 
to a focus, in a relatively new spiritual concentration, all 
the social and spiritual currents of their ages. Paul was 
the center of apostolic Christianity. Augustine was the 
spiritual focus of an age. Subsequent Catholic Christen- 
dom was until the thirteenth century in large part the 
lengthened shadow of Augustine. Thomas Aquinas and 
Dante are the spiritual burning glasses of their age, 
Luther and Calvin, of the main currents in the Reforma- 
tion. 

Insensibly and almost unconsciously the spiritual cur- 
rents of an age of transition and reconstruction run to- 
gether in its leaders to form new cultural creations. Men 
to-day bemoan the decay of religion. But if it be decay- 
ing, it is being reborn. If the existing Churches cannot 
be reborn to suit the new age, religion will find new and 
more adequate forms of expression. 

I am not here attempting a comparative philosophy of 
religion. I desire only to indicate its guiding principles 
and to apply them to the present. Every worth-while 
religion has been the unification, concentration and ele- 
vation into the Eternal and Transcendent, of the highest, 
most comprehensive goods of life for some great epoch 
of human culture. The spirit of Buddhism, with its em- 
phasis on the mergence of the individual self in the uni- 
versal, is a characteristic expression of ancient Hindu 
culture. It is a legitimate child of Vedantic pantheism. 
Classical Christianity was the offspring of the union of 


WHAT RELIGION IS 11 


the supreme expression, in universal and unique form, of 
the ethical monotheism of the Hebrew prophets with 
Greek philosophy.* Medieval Catholicism was the supreme 
expression of the gradually maturing culture of feudal 
Europe transfused with the rudiments of ancient Graeco- 
Catholic culture, Protestantism, especially in its Cal- 
vinistic form, was the expression of modern individualism, 
of a stern and characteristically northern and democratic 
individualism. 

The time is ripe for a new religious synthesis—for a 
religion which will comprehend, unify and lift up into 
the Eternal all the spiritual interests and values of the 
present. 

Such a religion will accept from science the principle 
of the universality of the causal order of nature. It will 
welcome and use the experimental method of science, 
which is in harmony with the point of view of Jesus: 
“He that heareth my words and doeth them.” “By 
their fruits ye shall know them.” It will make its 
own the new social spirit for which a man’s value to 
God and his fellows lies not in the abundance of his 
goods or the greatness of his power, but in the social 
function that he performs, the service that he renders. 
It will cherish the sense of reverent awe and wor- 
shipful prayer before the mysteries and tragedies of 
existence, but it will have done with crass fear and un- 
manning superstitition as religious motives. It will sum- 
mon its votaries to be clear-eyed, sane and self-respecting, 
albeit humble and reverent, before the problems and per- 
plexities of individual and social life. It will find the 


1 Jesus’ idea of God is essentially that of the great Hebrew 
prophets—of Isaiah, Hosea, Amos. 


12 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


good life, the life of highest value, not in penance and 
meditation among the tombs, but in the promotion of 
sanity, harmony, balance, joy and light among men. It 
will measure and judge all institutions, political, educa- 
tional, and economic, by their contributions to the devel- 
opment of a community of free men and women, free in 
knowledge, in clear-eyéd sanity, rejoicing in their com- 
mon fellowship, and striving for the well-rounded and 
harmonious life. Above all, it will reverence childhood 
and youth and lend all the power of conviction and faith 
to the nurture of children and youth in physical health, 
mental well-being and individual and social harmony. 
Therefore, the new religion will put the greatest possible 
emphasis on education. It will demand that we spend 
much more than we do, in money and well-directed 
thought, on the nurture and education of childhood and 
youth. ‘For of such is the kingdom of God.” 

The new religion will find a place for meditation, for 
the spiritual culture of individuality. In our reaction 
against the soul-crippling, body-destroying individualism 
which, under the great-scale industrialism of the mod- 
ern factory system, has wrought havoc, the pendulum 
threatens to swing to the other extreme. Religion is 
always a social force. But there is danger that in our 
praiseworthy emphasis on the social aspects of religion we 
forget that individual personality and community are two 
complementary aspects of the same spiritual fact. The 
trouble with individualism is that it makes, under mod- 
ern industrialism, for a maimed society, one full of con- 
flicts, disharmonies and human wastes and, therefore, 
tends towards social destruction. On the other hand, we 
must remember that it is just as true that a morally 


WHAT RELIGION IS 13 


healthy and spiritually vigorous community is an organ- 
ism or spiritual system consisting of individual persons, 
as it is true that personality can be developed and en- 
joyed only where the life of the community is rich in 
spiritual opportunity. What we must aim at is a com- 
munity life which nurtures and gives scope for a higher 
type of spiritual individuality. The new religion 
will recognize the equal worth of many forms of 
spiritual aspiration and experience. It will recognize 
that the development of the sense of beauty, the nurture 
of souls by the cultivation of artistic appreciation and 
creation, 1s Just as much a part of spiritual culture as the 
cultivation of knowledge in science and history. It will 
be Platonic in the sense that Plato found in the harmoni- 
ous cultivation and worship of beauty, truth and social 
justice the supreme good for man, and the adumbration 
in the human world of the Essential Form of the Good, 
the revelation of God in the individual soul and in the 
life of society. 

Spiritual religion, in its fullest form, always transcends 
the existing social order. It can never be the mere con- 
servation of the actual social customs and standards. The 
deeps of the individual spirit are ever stirred by the thirst 
for perfection, for communion with the Absolute Good, 
the Holy—the consummation of all truth, of all moral 
righteousness and of all beauty. Religion is social in its 
implications because it aims at an ideal community of 
persons. But for a truly spiritual religion the existing 
social order, the life of the state and of economic society, 
and even the activities and values of the common culture 
in the arts, sciences and morals must always fall short of 
the Perfect Object—God. Therefore religion both con- 


14 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


demns and aims to elevate the actually existing social 
life. It lives in the light and works by the guidance of 
an ideal community which, for faith, is not a mere ideal, 
a light that never was on land or sea, but the most com- 
plete, ever-present and enduring Reality. 


CHAPTER IT 
WORLD-VIEWS AND RELIGIOUS VALUES 


A world-view is a comprehensive conception of the 
cosmos with especial reference to man’s place in the cos- 
mos. Religion has its roots in judgments and convictions 
as to the true, satisfying and enduring goods of human 
life. In other words, religion springs out of an integral 
life-view which is espoused and served by the faithful. 
A religion which offered no ideas and promises as to the 
meaning and destiny of human life, which failed to give 
to man a satisfying conception of the Highest and Fullest 
Good, which offered him no means of relief from the ills 
of life, no way of salvation, would be a contradiction in 
terms. 

But personal life is lived out only in interaction with 
Reality, in interplay with other persons and with nature. 
Every integral life-view, then, implies a world-view. It 
is impossible that one should hold fervidly, in his feeling 
and conduct, to a way of life and not, either implicitly 
or explicitly, embrace the world-view involved in that 
life-view. If life be meaningless and void, if the human 
spirit and the ideals in which it finds spiritual health are 
impotent and ephemeral, if they are but momentary and 
delusive gleams appearing amidst the illimitable dark- 
ness of a stony and insensate universe, one can have 
only a religion of dumb despair and resignation. If life 

15 


16 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


be meaningful, the world as a whole must have a meaning. 
Every religion, then, implies a philosophy, a metaphysics, 
a doctrine of the cosmos, however crude or vague or in- 
coherent this doctrine may seem to one who holds another 
view. or religion presupposes that the life-values which 
it makes central and supreme, are grounded in the ulti- 
mate nature of Reality. 

The earliest and crudest forms of religion that one 
finds record of have a rudimentary philosophy or meta- 
physics. There is a belief in Mana, a mysterious influ- 
ence, a vaguely diffused power or energy, which mani- 
fests itself in all unusual happenings. Fearsome and 
beneficent things and events have Mana. It causes dis- 
ease and disaster and death. It is manifested in the wind, 
in the lightning, in the mysteries of birth, in the prowess 
of the warrior, in the skill of the. hunter or craftsman. 
Mana is controlled in part by spirits. These are not 
immaterial beings, but beings of finer, more tenuous, 
more elusive matter. 

There are devices by which man can control Mana. 
Magic is a system of such devices. Magic and religious 
practices are not at first distinguishable. The soul of 
man is distinguished from his body, which it can depart 
from and reénter. 

Primitive man is not illogical. There is no prelogical 
stage of human thinking. According to his lights he is 
logical. He seeks causes and formulates and applies 
theories of causal relation. What he lacks is an accumu- 
lation of carefully tested and rigorously analysed obser- 
vations, affirmative and negative, by which to keep his 
causal theories under control. As he accumulated more 
and better correlated instances of the temporal sequences 


WORLD-VIEWS AND RELIGIOUS VALUES 17 


in events, man increased his powers of control and adap- 
tation. 

And as by more successful control of natural forces 
and the organization of more stable social structures man 
attained more security, power and leisure, there emerged 
the notion of order, unity and continuity in nature, along 
with the notion of principles of social order. These 
complementary notions of natural order and social order 
grew up together. Then man takes the tremendous step 
of assuming that One Being, One Creative Will, is the 
Author and Governor of the twofold and interrelated 
realms of man and nature. We do not know when this 
great step was first taken. We do know that ethical 
monotheism was enunciated by the Hebrew prophets. 
What distinguishes their monism (or unitary view of the 
cosmos) is the great emphasis laid on social righteousness 
as the true service of God and the rapid growth of their 
religious and cosmical outlook towards universalistic 
monotheism. Their conception of God is the background 
of the teaching of Jesus and his apostles. 

In the meantime, the Greeks had worked out a meta- 
physics, or cosmology which culminates in Aristotle.* He 
does not attribute the creation of the world to the fiat of 
a Creative Will at a definite time. For him, the world 
is eternal. But he does conceive that the order of the 
cosmos and the graded series, or hierarchy of species of 
finite beings, from the lowest to man and higher than 
man, are due to the striving of all things to be like God. 
He conceives the universe to be one and have one mover 


1It is an error to assume that Aristotle departed radically from 
the metaphysics of Plato. Their kinship of view goes deeper than 
their differences in method of statement. 


18 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


—the Unmoved Mover, God, who draws the world after 
him by his inherent attractive power, since he is the 
Perfect Form of Being. Aristotle conceives the various 
species of organisms to be distinct, and their natures im- 
mutable. God is the eternally perfect self-contemplating 
Thought, the paragon and pattern for all Being. 

A finite-bounded universe moving upon itself, the earth 
its center, fixed species, the movements of the planets 
circular because circular motion is perfect—in short, a 
small and tidy universe (as Bertrand Russell puts it), 
aesthetically conceived and dependent upon an Eternal 
Thinker—such is Aristotle’s cosmos. It fitted in very 
well with the cosmological background of Hebrew 
prophetism and early Christian faith. The only dis. 
crepancy was that the Hebrews and Christians believed 
the physical cosmos to have been created in time by the 
fiat of the Divine Will, and matter to have been created 
by this Will out of nothing. Matter, in Aristotle, is just 
the potentiality of organized being, so there was no serious 
difficulty between Aristotle and Christian faith on this 
point. 

The classical world-view of Christianity is the fusion 
of the Aristotelian and the Biblical views. It is a geo- 
centric conception of the cosmos. It is not only geocentric, 
but lococentric. The scene of man’s creation and God’s 
primary dealings with man are located in the mountains 
from which spring the two rivers of Mesopotamia. Then 
the scene of the Divine transactions with man is trans- 
ferred from Mesopotamia to Palestine and Egypt, and 
again to Palestine. Gradually, other regions and other 
peoples are brought into the scheme, as the experiences of 
the faithful are widened. 


WORLD-VIEWS AND RELIGIOUS VALUES 19 


The elements of the classical Christian philosophy are 
these—God created the world in six days. He placed the 
earth in the center. He created man and the various 
species of organisms for man’s use. He endowed man 
with freedom, which he used to rebel against God. Sin, 
suffering and death thus came into the world by man’s 
free act of disobedience. God manifested himself at 
various times by miraculous deeds. He spoke his will 
through prophets. Finally he sent his own Son to re- 
deem man from sin by a loving sacrifice. The history 
of God’s direct dealings with man up to the organization 
of the Christian Church is enshrined in a book, every 
word of which is inspired. From this book, in Protestant- 
ism, all religious authority is derived. In Catholicism, 
the continuous and living authority resides in the succes- 
sion of apostolic vicars of Christ from Peter down to 
the living Pope. High Anglicanism has its seat of 
authority in a continuous line of bishops from the 
apostles down to the living bishops of the Church, but 
rejects the claim to supreme authority of the Bishop of 
Rome. 

This world-view is an admirable setting for the faith 
that nature is subservient to moral and spiritual values, 
that the moral order of personal and social life is supreme 
over the brute forces of the physical universe. The world- 
view of Plato and Aristotle was similar, and the Hebrew- 
Christian and Greek cosmologies fused together readily 
enough. The chief distinction is the greater emphasis on 
the value and reality of the individual soul or personality 
in Christianity, together with a higher valuation of the 
emotional and volitional basis of personality. There is 
a warmth, a concreteness, an intimate personal quality 


20 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


in the Christian view that is lacking in the Greek view 
of life. : 

One can admit a spiritual value in the traditional 
stories while denying their literal truth. For example— 
The story of the creation enshrines a truth of imperish- 
able spiritual value—the visible and tangible and pon- 
derable world is but a fragmentary and transitory world 
derived from, and dependent upon, the invisible, intan- 
gible and imponderable Creative Thought. The miracles 
are pictorial embodiments of the same insight of faith 
that the physical is the instrument of the moral and spir- 
itual. Their literal truth or untruth is unimportant be- 
side the principle of the supremacy of the Spiritual 
Order. As Goethe puts it, miracle is the dearest child 
of faith. Therefore, in ages before the mind had been 
permeated by the sense of the universal causal order in 
nature it was most natural to attribute to superlative per- 
sonalities physically miraculous origins, careers and de- 
partures. 

The cosmological metaphysics of classical Christianity, 
like that of Aristotle, seems to be undermined by the 
growth of modern science. (1) By the heliocentric 
astronomy with its vision of a universe boundless in space 
and endless in duration, and in which the earth is an in- 
significant and transitory speck. (2) By the advancing 
tide of natural law, by the increasing triumph of the 
causal postulate that every event has its conditions or 
causes in antecedent natural events. This rules out spe- 
cial divine intervention in the natural order. The tri- 
umph of mechanical modes of explanation has led to the 
confident assumption that nothing really exists but par- 
ticles of matter, and nothing really moves or changes be- 


WORLD-VIEWS AND RELIGIOUS VALUES 21 


yond the mechanically conditioned spatial configurations 
of particles of matter. (3) By the growth of the evolu- 
tionary theory which rules out special creation and finality 
of organic species. The world of life, like the natural 
cosmos, is fluid and is the expression of the ceaseless in- 
teraction of natural causes. (4) By the application of 
the method of critical history to sacred books, This has 
shown that those books are not unitary works from the 
hands of single authors, but composites written at various 
times, edited and reédited, full of folklore analogous to 
the folklore of other peoples. The ark of the covenant, 
for example, was fatal to the Philistines because it had 
Mana. The plague of serpents in the wilderness was 
cured by homeopathic magic. There are two creation 
stories. The historical books were written up and re- 
vised to suit the views of later times. The prophetic 
books are composites dating from different epochs; so are 
the Psalms: The Gospels are composites written from 
varying points of view, somewhat later than the sayings 
and events they record. 

The classical cosmology and anthropology associated 
with dogmatic Christianity have crumbled to ruin, and 
the authority of the Scriptures, as a literally and abso- 
lutely inspired textbook of astronomy, physics, biology, 
history and psychology, as well as of ethics and religion, 
has gone by the boards. 

The crucial question is: what becomes of the moral 
and spiritual values of the Hebrew-Christian tradition 
when the classical cosmological and anthropological frame- 
work has vanished ? 

Fundamentalism, mistakenly so-called, is a movement 
to preserve the absolute authority of the traditional cos- 


22 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


mology and historiography, because this authority is be- 
lieved to be indispensable to the preservation of the au- 
thority or supremacy of the Christian scheme of conduct 
and religion. One must pay to fundamentalism the trib- 
ute of being in deadly earnest. Moreover, one must admit 
that with the dissolution of the authority of traditional 
cosmology, anthropology and history there must be a re- 
vision of the spiritual values and principles of religion. 

If the heliocentric astronomy be true, the earth is not 
the center of the universe and, if there be a God, a Uni- 
versal Spirit, we have no reasonable right to suppose that 
his chief engrossing concern is with the earth and man. 
If the evolution hypothesis be true, then not only were 
all species not created for man’s use, but man did not 
bring upon himself suffering, labor and death by Adam’s 
sin. Suffering, labor and death are inevitable incidents 
in the life-history of finite being. Knowledge is not a 
result of Adam’s fall, but the most powerful instrument 
for human advancement. Then Christ did not come to 
redeem man from the otherwise unescapable and ever 
accumulating direful consequences of the free acts of our 
first parents. 

If methods of critical history and the modern scien- 
tific spirit be valid, then special acts of Divine interven- 
tion in, or suspension of, the order of nature and the 
casual sequence of historical events are discredited. 

The truly fundamental questions are: (1) Must we 
accept the results of modern cosmology, biology and eriti- 
cal history? (2) If we do this, what revision must be 
made of the classical Christian scheme of salvation ? 

I claim to be a fundamentalist, since I am going to 
deal with the fundamental questions. But I am a mod- 


WORLD-VIEWS AND RELIGIOUS VALUES) 23 


ernist, since I accept in the main the standpoints of mod- 
ern cosmology and the methods of natural science and 
critical history. I essay in what follows a statement of 
the present spiritual value of the Christian tradition in 
the light of modern thought. 

Before embarking upon this voyage of reconstruction, 
I shall state more fully the grounds for regarding tradi- 
tional cosmology and anthropology as a ruin, albeit a 
noble one. 


ae 


CHAPTER IIT 
SCIENCE AND TRADITIONALISM 


“Science has been the slowly advancing nemesis which 
has overtaken a barbarised and paganised Christianity. 
She has come with a winnowing fan in her hand, and she 
will not stop until she has thoroughly purged her floor.” 
Dean Inge. 

What is Traditionalism? Briefly, it is the assumption 
that in the traditional dogmas and ecclesiastical forms 
of so-called Catholic Christianity are to be found what- 
soever is necessary to the salvation of the individual and 
society. In complete and obedient acceptance of all that 
has been handed down from of old alone is salvation. 
Traditionalism is the attitude which holds that all saving 
truth was given once and for all tume to the Fathers. 
Our business is to preserve it intact and to abide by it. - 
Its favorite formulas are: ‘““The Holy Catholic Church 
teaches thus and so”; or, “The Fathers of the first six 
Christian centuries teach thus and so”; or, “The ecu- 
menical councils decreed thus and so”; or, “The Bible 
teaches thus and so.” Woe betide him who thinks other- 
wise. No modern doctrines or principles, however well- 
grounded on facts, or however illuminating as guides to 
action, can be true or right if they are not in complete 
harmony with the ancient traditions. If modern science 
—physics, astronomy, biology or psychology—is not in 

24 





SCIENCE AND TRADITIONALISM 25 


harmony with the traditions, so much the worse for mod- 
ern science. It is Devil’s lore. 

The first myth of the traditionalist is that there exists 
or ever has existed a wholly self-consistent content of 
theological truth, of Catholic truth, “the same yesterday, 
to-day, forever.” There is not, and there never has been, 
anything of the sort. The traditionalist attitude is by no 
means confined to ecclesiasticism. The assumption that 
all our traditionary moral, social, legal, political and eco- 
nomic institutions and customs are absolutely right and 
all-sufficient is another form of traditionalism, of the 
bondage of the living to the dead. 

It is chiefly with ecclesiastical traditionalism that we 
are concerned here. It has a protean character. For the 
central myth of the traditionalist is that the holy tradi- 
tion is fixed, complete and self-consistent. It is nothing 
of the sort. Consider a moment! For the unintelligent 
Anglo-Catholic, everything before the Reformation, every- 
thing medieval, however moth-eaten and musty, is part of 
the sacred tradition. For the more intelligent Anglo- 
Catholic the first eight centuries of the Church fixed the 
tradition. The Holy Spirit guided all the so-called ecu- 
menical councils. What the Spirit has been about since 
A.D. 787, the date of the last ecumenical council, does 
not appear.* For the Protestant traditionalist, who is a 
bibliolater, as the others are ecclesiolaters, the fixed tradi- 
tion is confined within the covers of the Protestant Bible. 
It includes the story of creation, the savage injunctions 
of Jahweh to the chosen people to smite their enemies 


1In doctrinal matters the Seventh Council in A.D. 787 only re- 
affirmed the pronouncements of the previous councils. Nothing ma- 
terial was added. 


26 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


hip and thigh and not leave one of them alive, all the 
details of the Jewish ritual, Joshua’s making the sun to 
stand still, the ascent of Elijah in a fiery chariot to 
heaven, the dreadful imprecations of the Psalms as well 
as their beautiful devotions, Jesus’ simple gospel of love 
and liberty, the Jewish Messianism of St. Paul and the 
preéxistent Logos doctrine of St. John. 

For the Romanist, most logical of traditionalists, it 
includes the latest pronouncements of the newest Pope on 
matters of doctrine and life. He is the living interpreter 
and maker of tradition. Thus the Romanist has a live 
agency for adjusting ancient saws and modern instances. 
Why should one stop with any particular date? The 
trouble with the Romanist is that he commits the inter- 
preting of old traditions and the making of new traditions 
to one man, advised by a conclave of ecclesiastics. 

The traditionalist, of whatsoever stripe, limits the true 
traditions to those accepted by his own sect, church, or 
party. These he desires to enforce on the consciences and 
intelligences of all others. I have said that traditionalism 
is based on a myth. No universally valid tradition has 
ever existed. It would take too long to survey even briefly 
the traditions that have been either silently dropped from 
use, or that have died of inanition, or that are now used 
only in a Pickwickian sense. I will confine my examina- 
tion to what we may call the core of the traditional 
Christian doctrine of the world and of man, of God and 
salvation. I will state it briefly: There was an eternity 
when nothing existed but God. At a certain time, be- 
tween five and six thousand years ago, He decided, no 
one knows why, to create a world. He created: first the 
Heavens and the earth; then, plants and animals; lastly, 


SCIENCE AND TRADITIONALISM 27 


man, whom He made in His own image and to whom he 
gave a living soul. Man was innocent and happy, enjoy- 
ing immortal leisure. But, tempted by the Devil, a fallen 
angel, man disobeyed the moderate prohibition of the 
Creator, and sin, and with it labor and death, entered 
into the human world. Four thousand years later, when 
the state of man had become very pitiful, God finally 
had compassion on him and sent his eternally begotten 
Son, the Messiah of the Jews and the preéxistent Logos 
of the Greeks. He assumed the form of a man, Jesus 
of Nazareth; taught men, wrought many miracles and, 
by his suffering on the cross, satisfied the Divine Wrath 
against the sins of men. This he alone could do, since 
men themselves, being finite and erring, never could make 
atonement for their sins against the Infinite Holiness. 
All who hear of, and accept, Christ as the Saviour, will 
be saved from eternal damnation. Christ rose from the 
dead and ascended bodily into the heavens. From thence 
he shall come at the end of the present world and judge 
all men. Those whom he accepts will enter upon the life 
of eternal bliss; those whom he rejects will enter into 
eternal punishment. This scheme of man’s origin and 
destiny is set in a neat framework. The earth is fixed 
in the center of the universe. Above it are the fixed 
stars and Heaven; underneath the abyss and the awful 
shades of Hell. The map of the universe is charted out 
in Dante’s Divine Comedy and in Milton, the Protestant 
Dante. It is a physically small and tidy universe; the 
only serious untidinesses in it are, first, that due to Satan’s 
rebellion, and second, that due to man’s sinful disobedi- 
ence and fall, by which suffering and death come into 
the world. God is somewhere outside the world. He 


28 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


miraculously intervenes in its affairs, as He did on various 
occasions recorded in Holy Writ and Tradition. 

If one were to fix any time for the completion of this 
tradition in its classical outlines it would be the thirteenth 
century. Then Thomas Aquinas gave the complete state- 
ment of traditional cosmology and theology, and Dante 
incorporated it in his immortal poem. 

This system is an imposing edifice; but, either modern 
science 1s false through and through, or the traditional 
system is in irremediable ruin. It is time to stop trying 
to patch up the old ruin and build a new mansion in 
which our spirits may dwell and grow in freedom, light 
and power. 

Within three centuries, the framework of medieval 
cosmology had been knocked to pieces by Galileo and his 
coworkers. Three centuries later, by the work of many 
hands, preéminent among them Darwin, Wallace and 
Huxley, the very foundations of the edifice were under- 
mined, 

Modern astronomy has established, beyond reasonable 
doubt, that the earth, so far from being fixed in the center 
of things, is but an insignificant speck of matter, spinning 
in infinite space. There are many stars known to be 
larger than our sun. Our entire solar system is but one 
of a large number traveling at immense velocities through 
infinite space. Some idea of the staggering immensity 
of the physical universe may be formed from the fact 
that light now reaching us from a remote star cluster has 
been traveling 220,000 light years since it left the cluster. 
Light travels 186,000 miles per second. A light year is 
the distance light travels in one year. Consider then how 
far away a star cluster is, the light from which takes 


SCIENCE AND TRADITIONALISM 29 


220,000 years to reach this earth. A billion years are 
but as one moment in the life of the universe. The 
universe, as known to modern science, is infinite in extent 
and eternal in duration. ‘There can never have been a 
time when the world was not. Creation never began, and 
will never end. The duration of our earth may be a 
billion years. But the age of the earth is but a moment in 
the history of the universe. And every instant in its 
history is the expression of unvarying physical and me- 
chanical law. 

Traditionalism adjusted itself, after a fashion, to the 
new world-view. It maintained, however, that man, his 
soul’s affairs and destiny, is exceptional to the universal 
order. The animals and plants, like the earth and the 
stars, might be surrendered to the invading army of sci- 
entific law. But man has a spirit, and God has direct 
dealings with him. The traditionalist let the astronomical 
_ theory of the world’s origin stand, provided the scientist 
would let the traditional story of man’s origin and destiny 
stand. 

But three centuries after the triumphant resurrection 
of the heliocentric astronomy, another ancient hypotheses, 
that of man’s evolutionary origin, was put on the solid 
ground of verifiable fact. This theory is no longer a 
guess. It is a well-established principle, not doubted by 
any competent astronomer, geologist, biologist or psychol- 
ogist to-day. The disputes concern only the details of 
method. Man is no exception in the order of life. He 
belongs to the Simian species. His ancestor was Hoan- 
thropus, a cousin of the anthropoid ape. Adam’s inno- 
cence was the ignorance of Hoanthropus. Man did not 
fall from a state of innocence and bliss and immortality 


30 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


either in Eden or from a star, as Plato thought. He 
descended, but he did not fall, from the trees of his an- 
cestors. He shed his tail, began to walk on his hind legs, 
and by the use of the wonderful dawning powers of vivid 
memory, active imagination and creative reason, he began 
his long march upward, Man has stumbled and gotten 
lost, but he has picked himself up and found himself 
again. Still forward he struggles on his way in the dark, 
lighted by the torch of hope and faith, guided by the 
map of imagination and reason. [’orward down the ring- 
ing corridors of time goes man our brother, man ourself. 
Let him cast off the encumbering baggage of prehistoric 
fears, of foolish customs and childish superstitions. Let 
him challenge sternly every hoary survival from his own 
dim red dawn that now impedes the pathway which is 
charted by the intelligent facing of facts and their inter- 
pretation in the light of reason. 

The modern scientific conception of nature and man is 
incompatible with every single item in the traditionalist 
scheme, from the six-day creation to the Last Judgment 
and the commitment of men to eternal damnation and 
eternal bliss. No sudden creation by a cosmic artificer, 
no free fall of man from innocence, no extramundane 
Deity miraculously intervening once in a while, no spatial 
and literal heaven and hell. No damnation for men at 
the hands of the offended dignity of an omnipotent 
Creator, who, being omnipotent, might have made man 
able to avoid sin, but chose, in his inscrutable caprice, to 
make man so weak that he must fall and then punishes 
him through eternity for falling. Such are the negative 
conclusions from the scientific point of view. Let us stop 
equivocating and face them, and ask ourselves what is 


SCIENCE AND TRADITIONALISM 31 


left in the way of a spiritual world-view when we have 
faced the music and admitted that traditionalism has gone 
by the boards. 

It is my purpose in the following chapters to consider 
precisely this question: What spiritual outlook does the 
modern world-view allow us? Can we accept it and pre- 
serve anything of the spiritual value of traditional re- 
ligion? JI think we must accept the new view. I think 
also that we can preserve the human values of the impulse 
which originated in Nazareth nineteen centuries ago. 
When I dig down through the strata of misconceptions 
and misinterpretations which began with the attempt to 
prove that the Jewish Messiah had come, and went on to 
prove that the second person of the Trinity, the Pre- 
existent Logos, had®appeared in the body of a man, I 
find a wonderfully genial, profound and simple insight 
into human nature and the true values of life. I find 
the rudiments of a truly humane and universal vision of 
good life. But that is another story, to be taken up later. 
I will close by summing up the case against traditionalism. 

There are three chief counts against the acceptance of 
the traditional doctrine of Nature, Man and God. (1) 
These doctrines are incompatible with the results of the 
modern scientific interpretation of nature and human 
history. (2) These doctrines are internally inconsistent 
—self-contradictory. If the miraculous creation did not 
begin in 4004 B.C., when did it begin? How much 
authority have the Hebrew traditions, the survivals of 
primitive customs and folklore, many of which are of 
Babylonian origin? Must we accept Joshua’s arresting 
of the sun, the fiery chariot of Elijah, the story of Jonah 
and the whale, along with the virgin birth of Jesus and 


32 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


the material ascent into the heavens, as well as the mir- 
acles of raising from the dead? Did God’s miraculous 
interventions in history cease with the apostolic age? Or 
do they continue to the present, at Mons, at Lourdes and 
St. Anne de Beaupré? When was the correct interpreta- 
tion of supernaturalism_completed? At the council of 
Chalcedon, or by St. Thomas Aquinas? Or is the inter- 
pretation still going forward? How are we to judge what 
are the credible facts and the reasonable interpretations ? 
Are we to accept the Papal interpretations? Or those 
of American Episcopalian bishops? Or of the General 
Convention of clerical and lay delegates? Or of the 
Presbyterian General Assembly? Has one ever heard of 
a scientific truth or a new religious insight being estab- 
lished in convention? Have not s@ientific truths been 
discovered and the evidence for them collected and sifted 
by lonely individuals working long and patiently and 
humbly in laboratories and in fields? Have not all new 
religious values been the work of individual seers and 
prophets? Have organizations and committees ever dis- 
covered, or created, or formulated any profound truth, 
anything beautiful or noble? Is it not by the lonely 
travail of the individual spirit, obeying the irresistible 
urge of his own imagination and his own reason that 
truth is found and beauty created and righteousness 
visioned? If we must use our reason to decide between 
conflicting interpretations, must we not go farther and 
use our reason to reject traditions that do not square with 
the principles of science? Which is the better guide— 
inferences from observable facts or inferences from what 
are at best conflicting traditions, from the records of the 
past, in which the recorders’ own spiritual and intellectual 


SCIENCE AND TRADITIONALISM 33 


limitations played a great role in determining the records ? 

(3) Traditionalism is a practical failure in the face of 
the problems of the new industrialism. Traditionalism is 
a two-world theory. There are two separate worlds in its 
scheme: here earth, there heaven; here flesh, there spirit ; 
here sin, there miraculous redemption; here death, there 
immortal life; here renunciation, there bliss untold. An 
individual, or a group which holds to this two-world 
theory, cannot have much passion for turning human 
society into a fitter place to live in now. It becomes part 
of the divinely ordained scheme of things to endure the 
evils of this world, if the measure of one’s endurance of 
these present ills is to determine his reward in the future 
realm of bliss. The saints are free to inherit the next 
world, provided the vigorous sinners who have the whip 
hand in this world are left undisturbed in their posses- 
sions and powers. ‘The prosperous sinners are very well 
satisfied, as a rule, with this division of things. 

The beatitudes are actually advanced as a reason for 
not disturbing the existing order. With what holy unction 
ean the profiteer say, ‘“‘Blessed are the poor, for thezrs is 
the kingdom of heaven,” heaven being very remote, but 
profits right at hand! 

I do not mean for a moment to say that, in past ages 
organized Christianity has not been a great spiritual force. 
It has done much to chasten and uplift and harmonize 
the unruly wills and passions of sinful men. In the later 
Roman Empire, in the Dark Ages that followed the fall 
of the Empire, Christianity was the chief custodian of 
culture, the one great refining and moralizing agency. 
In the rude and vigorous Middle Ages it softened the 
barbarism of the new races. It toned down feudalism. 


34 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


It moralized industry and trade. Time and again it has 
softened the asperities of civilization, as well as been a 
moral stay and a spiritual consolation to many a dis- 
traught soul. But all this is aside from the present issue. 
Traditionalism, not content with exaggerating the moral 
and cultural influence of the ancient and medieval 
Church, proposes that we shall remedy all our present ills 
by harking back to medievalism, or to the post-apostolic 
or to the apostolic ages. To these proposals there are 
two fatal obstacles, even if the traditionalists would agree 
as to just what we are to revive, which they do not. (1) 
We cannot be sure just how much the ancient and medi- 
eval Church achieved. The records were written mostly 
by churchmen. The vast majority of those who lived then 
died without leaving any records. It is quite as easy 
and foolish to exaggerate the glories of the past as it is 
to depreciate it in ignorant satisfaction with the present. 
(2) Even though the Church did all that is claimed for 
it then, it does not follow that to restore the apostolic or 
medieval spirit, if it could be done, would bring similar 
results to-day. The past is dead and gone. It can never 
be lived again. The revival of an ancient, or nearer 
past 1s impossible; if it were possible, it would be useless 
because irrelevant. We do not live in the first, or the 
fourth, or the thirteenth, but in the twentieth century. 
We have our own troubles and problems, our own virtues 
and vices, failures and successes. The more I read history 
in the light of the present, the more I see the truth of 
Hegel’s saying—one thing we learn from history, that 
mankind does not learn anything from history. We must 
face the future in the light of the present. We have to 
face a world becoming more and more imbued with the 
method and spirit of science, of industrialism, of demo- 


SCIENCE AND TRADITIONALISM 30 


eratic unrest. To seek to live in the romantic shadows 
of a medieval twilight is foolish. We cannot live even 
in the apostolic dawn, glorious though it were. | 

The problem for us here and now, is this: How can 
the moral power, the refining, uplifting and harmonizing 
of the natural impulses of man, which traditional religion 
achieved when it was not a tradition but a living thing 
and part and parcel of the social life in which it had its 
being, be now made effective in a civilization that differs 
radically from any civilization in which Christianity or 
any other religion has hitherto functioned? What will 
do for our new civilization the work which ancient and 
medieval Christianity did for their civilizations? For 
this is a new civilization in which we live. 

The two biggest revolutions that have been, and are 
still, making this new civilization—revolutions much 
vaster and deeper and more lasting in effects than the 
French or the Russian revolution—are the rise of modern 
science and the dustrial revolution; the third great 
revolution which is even now just getting into full swing 
is popular or democratic education. By this the results 
and spirit of modern science will become a living part 
of the popular mind. The future civilization is being 
built up in schoolroom, laboratory and study. Tradition- 
alists may inveigh and lament as they please in regard 
to the irreligious and godless character of the public school 
and the state university. But they might as well try to 
beat back the waves of the Atlantic with a broom, as to 
stop this movement. It will go forward, and by it the 
new civilization will be made, more than by any other 
single force. The sacred shrine of American and of all 
democracy is popular education. 

The question for those concerned with religion is this: 


36 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


Is there any longer a real place, a vital function, for 
religion at all? What is religion good for now? What 
religion is good for something to-day? It must be open 
to the spirit and teachings of science. It must find room 
for all the normal human impulses and their values. It 
must be able to gather into a great imaginative and poetic 
synthesis all the strivings, hopes and faiths of a vast 
democracy whose ministers and high priests are the 
teachers and discoverers of truth, who teach and discover, 
who paint pictures and sing poems and dream dreams, in 
order that humanity as a whole, no longer a privileged 
few, may enter into the fullness and joy of the more 
abundant life. 

No thoughtful student of human affairs will question 
the power of tradition in all that concerns the cultural 
life of man. The on-going of civilization depends upon 
it. There must be some continuity in social, political, 
moral and other cultural structures, if civilization is to 
endure and progress. ‘There must be an ethical and 
spiritual continuity in man’s religious life, if religion is 
to minister effectively to the soul of man. The value of 
tradition is that it conserves the best in the living ideals 
and patterns of the past, and enables the present genera- 
tion to be nurtured on these. But it must be a living 
past—it must be a tradition that actually functions in 
the living present. Insistence on the authority of tradi- 
tion is harmful when it hinders the creative life of the 
spirit now. Room and free play must be allowed for the 
revision of tradition in the light of new creative insights. 
Each fresh creation in the cultural life of humanity be- 
comes an increment added to the riches of the living and 
effective tradition. All vital and significant history is 


a — 
ee el 


SCIENCE AND TRADITIONALISM 37 


contemporaneous, Whatsoever in tradition cannot be in- 
terpreted, assimilated and used by the present generation, 
in such a way as to further its own life, is just dead and 
meaningless encumbrance. All vital tradition must have 
its roots and its justification in the inward and spiritual 
present. The archaic past is, per se, worthless. 

The hide-bound traditionalist, in contrast with the 
modernist interpreter of tradition, has two great defects: 
(1) He vainly tries to arrest, or even to turn back, the 
tide of intellectual and spiritual life; (2) he does not 
even understand the traditions which he so valiantly seeks 
to conserve intact. If he did understand them, he would 
see that the best service he could render the spiritual life 
of to-day would be to reinterpret, to modify, and, in certain 
cases, to abandon the traditions. Here, as everywhere, 
the letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive. If a tradi- 
tion cannot live with the methods and results of con- 
temporary and growing knowledge, it is useless—nay, 
more, it is positively harmful. If a symbol has lost its 
meaning, let it go. If it can be made over to serve the 
present, then make it over. If a tradition be good for 
anything, it must be good for something to-day. Un- 
fortunately, especially in America, traditionalists who are 
violent partisans of what they suppose to be the truth, 
once delivered, are generally devoid of historical insight. 
The possession of historical insight does not mean that, 
for example, one can repeat the words of the Chalcedonian 
decree or of Thomas Aquinas, but that one understands 
what these words meant, under the cultural conditions of 
their own ages, to the men who uttered or accepted them. 


CHAPTER IV 
THE RECRUDESCENCE OF PAGANISM 


The term “paganism” in the title of this chapter is 
used in a derogatory sense. In its broadest sense, of 
course, paganism has included some of the noblest insights 
and truest conceptions to which humanity has hitherto 
attained. It includes Plato and the Stoics, Confucius, 
Lao-tsu and Gotama Buddha. It is not in this inclusive 
and eulogistic sense that the term is employed in our 
present discussion. What we have in mind now is the 
decaying paganism, which primitive Christianity con- 
fronted and conquered by the might of a new moral 
energy. 

When we speak of paganism recrudescent to-day, we 
have in mind the wanton luxury, the gross sensualism, 
the cult of unnatural vices, the decay of family life and 
of the old republican simplicity and integrity, the judicial 
and political corruption which Seneca bemoans, Juvenal 
satirizes, and St. Paul lashes. The Roman world turned 
in this welter of moral confusion and anarchy to the 
moral energy, spiritual purity, and selfless devotion of 
the Christian to save society. 

As always in the transformations of cultures, the causes 
of the decadence of antique paganism were complex. The 
gods of Greece and Rome were dead, their shrines aban- 
doned. They were powerless to withstand the destroying 

38 





THE RECRUDESCENCE OF PAGANISM — 39 


eriticism of Greek philosophy and science; their charac- 
ters gave no room and inspiration for the nobler ethical 
and religious ideals voiced by Socrates and Aeschylus, 
Plato and the Stoics. Intellectually untenable, morally 
wanting, the old mythological faiths were wholly inade- 
quate to meet the new demands of the political, industrial, 
and general social revolution wrought by the rise and 
rapid spread of the Roman Empire. Economic and po- 
litical forces operated no less than intellectual and ethical 
principles to render paganism obsolescent. In Greece, the 
old ancestral piety and morality of custom had already 
crumbled before intellectual enlightenment and political 
revolution, In Rome, the ancestral religion perished with 
the republic, and the inrush of Greek science destroyed its 
lingering relics of life. The social and moral life of the 
empire was saved by an obscure movement emanating 
from Palestine. Do we find anything in the contemporary 
state of society that 1s analogous to this decadent pagan- 
ism? If so, what are the causes and the remedies ? 


There are, I think, in our social life many symptoms 
of moral confusion and disintegration that present strik- 
ing, and even startling analogies to the decadent paganism 
of the Roman world under the Cesars. We, too, have 
our commercial Cesarism that saps the foundations of 
the republic. Our Cesars have ridden roughshod over 
the moral rights of the weaker, or have, by insidious 
methods of bribery, poisoned the founts of law and equity 
in our legislative halls. If they have not made spectacles 
to appease the public, they have tried to do so by generous 
subscriptions to church and college. They have taken 
toll from the worst criminals, and have debauched the 


40 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


administration of justice. The family life is notoriously 
endangered among us, and in ever increasing measure, 
by the rapidly growing frequency of divorce, which, in 
turn, is but a symptom of deeper-lying ethical laxity and 
confusion. The unblushing effrontery and sensual sug- 
gestiveness of the lascivious stage corrupt our youth. The 
appalling increase of suicide, even among the young, indi- 
cates a weakening sense of personal responsibility, a break- 
ing down of faith in human dignity, with a corresponding 
heightening of the tension of living. When one reads 
some of the verdicts of juries on crimes of passion, one 
wonders whether the belief in the value of law is dying 
out entirely, and whether men are not becoming blind to 
the fateful consequences of ignoring the moral founda- 
tions of state and society. And, when one considers the 
frequent and grave outbursts of lawlessness, the rapid 
growth of hoodlumism and crimes of violence, one is 
tempted to think that the belief in the majesty of law 
and the necessity of order in the community life are 
passing through an eclipse. We seem to be in the midst 
of a new individualism of the sophistical brand, for which 
the individual, with his momentary whims, passions, and 
impulses, is the sole measure of moral values; which 
means, of course, that objective moral values are no longer 
recognized. 

In many directions, then, our social life shows lack of 
ethical stability. It is an age of seeming confusion and 
disintegration, in which many souls are drifting rudder- 
less on a chartless sea. 

The question arises: Are not these disturbing and 
alarming symptoms of the moral life of our society simply 
illustrations of the eternal warfare of flesh and spirit, 


THE RECRUDESCENCE OF PAGANISM § 41 


expressions of a persistent antagonism between the two 
souls that dwell in every human breast, and struggle anew 
in every generation that is born under the sun? Is this 
present time really worse than any other time? Might 
not an alarmist of the eighteenth, or the thirteenth, or 
any other century, have found the same pagan tendencies 
at work? Is not man naturally pagan in all the genera- 
tions that are born? Doubtless there is truth in this view 
of man’s moral lot. Every successive generation must 
fight its own ethical battles, and win its own spiritual 
peace. Nevertheless, there seem to be tides and seasons 
in the moral and spiritual history of mankind, ages of 
greater coherence, unity, and simplicity, and transitional 
ages of confusion, perplexity, and apparent disintegration. 
And our own time seems to be one of spiritual confusion 
and transition. At any rate, it is the age that is actual 
for us, and it behooves us to know, and, if possible, to 
remedy, its weaknesses. If the reconstructive forces are 
not clearly effective, they must be discovered and set in 
operation. 

I think, that, in their causes, as well as in their symp- 
toms, our social diseases bear striking analogies to the 
sophistical age of Athenian life, and to the Roman world 
of the Cesars. Just as then the older political organiza- 
tions of the small city-states, with their industrial and 
social homogeneity, were merged in the great world em- 
pire, with its cosmopolitan administration of law, its tax 
farming, etc., so we have witnessed the passing away of 
an old economic order, the merging of the industrial and 
social life of farm and village in the vast industrial or- 
ganizations that center in great cities. Just as the Roman 
moralist laments the decay of country life, and the over- 


42 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


crowding of the cities, so may we. These industrial 
changes are transforming our political institutions, our 
notions of government and law. In all directions social 
reconstruction is imperative, and in some it is well under 
way. In the sphere of conduct and spiritual conviction 
it is a more difficult, and therefore a slower process. Here, 
other causes of an intellectual and moral sort have been 
at work. Natural science and historical science have 
wrought a revolution in thinking men’s views of the uni- 
verse, and of the origins of religions. The doctrine of 
literal inspiration has faded away before the dissolving 
power of the higher criticism, and with this doctrine has 
gone the unquestioning submission to the words of Holy 
Scripture. The deistical theology, inherited from the 
eighteenth century, pictured God as a great artificer, 
dwelling apart from his creation, who once upon a time 
manufactured and set running a world of which all the 
parts fitted into the exquisite harmony of an infinitely 
vast and complicated mechanism. God thus conceived, 
was a kind of indefinitely enlarged and glorified watch- 
maker, a cosmical inventive genius in mechanics. And 
the world which he had manufactured and set going for 
indefinite time he left alone to run by itself, except that 
upon very special occasions, when things were getting 
badly out of gear, he might intervene, either of his own 
motion, or at the earnest request of men. 

Modern evolutionary thought is hostile to this deistical 
conception of God. It has gradually crumbled away be- 
fore the triumphant march of biology and cosmical phys- 
ics. The natural world is now viewed by science as a 
ceaseless process, in whose unresting and irresistible flow 
nothing remains identifiably the same, except the order 


THE RECRUDESCENCE OF PAGANISM = 43 


and direction of change. Suns and star systems indefinite 
in number, and unimaginable in the vastness of their 
extent and movement, have evolved and are evolving 
through the ceaseless transformations of energy. Even 
the physical elements of the universe are probably in 
evolution. The alchemists’ dream of the transmutation 
of the elements seems to be coming true. Life arose at 
first in simple and relatively unorganized form, as col- 
loidal chemical substance, and has evolved into ever more 
complex forms and functions of movement and conscious- 
ness. Nowhere in the universal process of nature is there 
perfect adjustment and harmony; nowhere and nowhen 
is there special need for intervention of a supermundane 
power in the natural process of things. At no point in 
space and no juncture in the time-process does science 
find or recognize the static finished world, the flawless 
mechanism. The great artificer must be ever present and 
continuously at work, or nowhere and not at all. For 
the natural world is not a world of static perfection and 
imperturbable peace. It is a world that ever strives to- 
ward perfection, that is, perhaps, moving towards some 
“far-off divine event,” as yet unapprehended. 

Teachers of religion are well aware how widely dis- 
seminated in the popular mind are these generalizations 
of scientific thought which conflict with traditional forms 
of theology. There is plenty of cheap and easy material- 
ism abroad. Even where it is not adopted in the form 
of a creed it breeds in many minds confusion, and a 
weakening, or even total loss, of spiritual conviction. And 


the obverse of the breakdown of the old sources of au- 


thority and the loss of faith in traditional theologies is 
seen in a passionate craving that breeds the credulity 


44 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


which seeks satisfaction for a spiritual hunger in spirit- 
ualism, Oriental cults, and the nebulous nonsense that 
calmly ignores the facts of experience, and blurs out in 
its optimistic cloudland the distinction between disease 
and health, pain and pleasure, good and evil, spirit and 
matter. 

“Our hearts were made for Thee, O God, and they are 
unquiet until they find Thee.” 

There are those, who in this critical pass offer the easy 
solution that it matters not what a man believes or thinks, 
provided he does what is right. The proviso begs the 
question. Man’s life is not made up of a series of water- 
tight compartments. His creed or creedlessness must af- 
fect his deeds. In the storm and stress of life a thinking 
man must have a view of life, a conviction as to the 
meaning of human destiny, to steer his course by. 

There are others who put forward the claim that natural 
sclence can supply an adequate ethical conception of life. 
We are told that natural science stands on the solid ground 
of experience. It has a well-defined mode of procedure, 
and reaches verifiable conclusions; whereas religion and 
philosophy have neither empirical basis, sound method, 
nor assured results. So we have a modern Stoicism, which 
preaches “life according to nature” as the way to virtue 
and happiness. ‘Learn to know and obey the laws of 
the natural order” is the mandate of this school. Well, 
no one can really break the laws of nature. A somnambu- 
list who falls from an upper window breaks his own head, 
not the law of gravitation. The deeds of the murderer 
and of the heroic life-saver are both in harmony with the 
laws of nature. The natural order is apparently indif- 
ferent to our human categories of good and evil. In the 


THE RECRUDESCENCE OF PAGANISM = 45 


face of our moral struggles it preserves the calm of a 
disinterested aloofness. 

The imposing march of natural science, its theoretical 
victories and practical triumphs, must not blind us to 
the intellectual error and moral emptiness that result from 
the endeavor to extract from the study of the physical 
order alone ethical principles and religious uplift. Moral 
paganism is, logically, a legitimate outcome of materialism 
and naturalistic pantheism. For, as Huxley clearly saw, 
nature apart from man is nonmoral. It seems indifferent 
to man’s moral visions, insensible to his spiritual aspira- 
tions, and turns no living face to his desire for personal 
companionship. We may commune with nature in her 
aesthetic aspects, and be refreshed and gladdened thereby. 
There is a great calming and uplifting spiritual power 
in the contemplation of nature’s beauty and majesty—a 
power which relieves the soul from fret, fever, worry 
and sickly self-introspection; which frees us from the 
prison-house of our miserable egohood, and therefore has 
a religious quality. But in the struggle for personal 
integrity and social righteousness we require some other 
resource. Matthew Arnold has most clearly and beauti- 
fully expressed the truth that man, as a moral being, 
transcends the natural order: 

When thou dost bask in Nature’s eye, 
Ask how she viewed thy self-control, 
Thy struggling, tasked morality— 


Nature, whose free, light, cheerful air 
Oft made thee in thy gloom despair. 


See, on her face a glow is spread, 

A strong emotion on her cheek. 
“Ah, child,” she cries, “that strife divine, 
Whence was it? for it is not mine. 


# 


46 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


“There is no effort on my brow; 
I do not strive, I do not weep; 
Yet that severe, that earnest air, 
I saw, I felt it once—but where? 


“T knew not yet the gauge of time, 
Nor wore the manacles of space; 
I felt it in some other clime, 
I saw it in some other place. 
’T was when the heavenly house I trod, 
And lay upon the breast of God.” 


From no worship of nature alone can be drawn the moral 
power and insight to save society. Man is nature’s in- 
surgent son, and he must look elsewhere than to the 
physical order for guidance and inspiration in his social 
and moral problems. 

Nature, Man, and God are the three factors involved 
in the ethical and social life. Ethically viewed, nature 
exists that man may, by conquest and control, turn her 
forces, both those within his own bosom, and those in the 
outer world, to the realization of ends which he derives 
from a source which is beyond nature. 

If the deistical conceptions of the relations of nature, 
man, and God are no longer tenable, and if the natural 
order, taken by itself, yields no adequate counsels or 
inspirations for man’s ethical-social life, where are we to 
look? We must look, I take it, to the rational conscience 
within us, to the needs of the social order in which we 
are inalienable members, and to the moral order of history, 
as the threefold revelation of the Divine purpose and 
destiny of man as an ethical and spiritual being. God, 
the supreme ethical principle, is known in the individual 
conscience, in the social order, and in the spiritual move- 
ment of the historical process. 


THE RECRUDESCENCE OF PAGANISM 47 


History had no progressive moral significance for the 
ancient pagan. Hence he never reached a vital and for- 
ward-looking doctrine of an ideal social order. He had 
no vision of continued ethical progress, and no burning 
zeal for reform (I except Plato). History can have no 
moral significance for the modern pagan. All moral dis- 
tinctions are swallowed up in the eternal repetitions of 
the physical process of things. /'aith in human progress 
and in the possibility of the continuous moral betterment 
of mankind is of Hebrew and Christian origin. It was 
the Hebrew prophets who first proclaimed at once the 
necessity of social righteousness as the basis of the true 
worship of God, and the inviolable moral order of history, 
by virtue of which the fates of nations and of individuals 
are determined by their attitudes towards these ethical 
principles of social life. Jehovah is the Guardian of the 
moral order and the Judge of all the nations, not of 
Israel alone: “He shall judge between many peoples, and 
shall reprove strong nations afar off.”” The true Shekinah 
of God is found in the conscience of man which points 
him towards his brother, and in that unhasting but unrest- 
ing moral process of historical judgment by which the fates 
of nations are determined in accordance with their faith- 
fulness to the Divine principles of justice and loving- 
kindness. 

Paganism has gained ground for this other reason, 
namely, a practical attitude towards man’s social life that 
was at once a legitimate consequence of pietistic individu- 
alism and, logically, of deistical theology. If man’s sole 
aim as a spiritual being should be to get his individual 
soul saved, regardless of what may become of his brother’s 
soul and body, and if the common social life of industry 


48 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


and school, community and state, science and art, is with- 
out spiritual value, then, of course, religion has nothing 
to do with society and culture. Its sole business is to 
furnish individual tickets for heaven. And it follows 
that, when one is awake to a full sense of the interest 
and significance of this present life, and of the beauty 
and power of the natural world, a religious system, which 
takes no account of, and finds no spiritual value in, these 
things, will tend to lose hold on men’s interest. If the 


representatives of religion have not seen and proclaimed © 


the ethical and spiritual significance of society and state, 
of work and art, is it surprising that, when these interests 
become more prominent and engrossing, the lay mind 
should not discover their essential need of ethical bases ? 
Individualism and deistical otherworldliness bear fruit in 
an immoral industrial system, an unethical conception of 
state and society, an unspiritual world-view. 

Another form of materialism is rife in American society 
to-day—the practical materialism which estimates national 
progress and prosperity in quantitative terms, in bigness 
of population and wealth, in individual achievement and 
well-being, in terms of external success and power, of 
opportunity for sensuous enjoyment. This is, of course, 
a danger that threatens the inner soul-life of man in all 
ages. But it is peculiarly an ominous danger in this age, 
in which our country has grown to material greatness. 
Industrially we have grown faster than any other modern 
people. But have we not lost the idealism of the nation’s 
founders? Certainly our national soul has not brought 
a yield corresponding at all in greatness to our physical 
achievements. 

Why should we boast ourselves and swell with pride 


ae] Se eee ee ee 


THE RECRUDESCENCE OF PAGANISM = 49 


because God has given to us the greatest natural oppor- 
tunity that has ever fallen to the lot of a nation? We 
have, indeed, with unexampled headlong energy trans- 
formed the natural face of this great continent, and even 
prodigally wasted our resources. But what abiding con- 
tributions have we made to the spiritual heritage of the 
race? In other words, what have we achieved in those 
realms of human production that cannot be weighed and 
appraised by the senses? I do not know any lesson that 
needs to be driven home more insistently and forcibly to 
our people than that Athens, the intellectual mother of 
our culture, was, in the days of her greatest glory, a city 
less than half the size of Buffalo, and that Palestine, the 
fountain-head of the redeeming ethical and religious 
powers in our life, had a smaller area than the state of 
Vermont. Amidst our great swelling words of ‘‘progress,” 
it is well to call to mind such facts, and to ask ourselves 
what shall insure the spiritual immortality of our nation, 
when in the political vicissitudes of history it shall have 
gone the way of all peoples? Politically, the Israel of 
Isaiah and Jesus, and the Athens of Sophocles and Plato 
have long since fallen before the scythe of Time, but 
spiritually they will endure as long as the light of reflective 
thought, and the spur of moral and religious aspiration 
move in the soul of man. Their names are written in 
the Lamb’s book of life, their acts endure in the ever- 
lasting movements of the spirit. Shall we seek for our 
nation a like remembrance and persistence, or shall we 
be content to leave our records in the dust to which all 
merely material achievement eventually returns ? 

In view of the moral situation to-day, what is most 
needed in religion is a reémphasis of man’s uniqueness 


50 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


in the order of nature, a reinterpretation of the cosmical 
spiritual meaning of man’s moral and social history as 
the revelation of the Divine spiritual order, and of God 
as the immanent sustaining and directing power of the 
whole social-historical movement of ethical humanity. 
You may find in physical nature an infinite and eternal 
energy, a God who works-in accordance with mathematical 
formulas, but you must look elsewhere for a God who 
accounts for the human conscience, and for the social life 
and thought in which this conscience is born and grows. 
You will not find in your God of nature any clue to the 
tangled threads of man’s moral history, or any interpreta- 
tion of man’s unceasing struggle in the ongoing of his 
social life to embody the visions of justice, peace, and 
love, which have haunted and urged on his spirit through 
all the toilsome and devious pathways of the centuries, 
ever since, in the dawning sense of higher values than 
those of mere brute existence, man first saw afar off the 
kingdom of the Goon. 

To give clearer expression and justification to this 
ethical-religious view of society and history, we need to 
have taught a philosophy of life and reality, which shall 
recognize the utter inadequacy of physical concepts and 
materialistic speculations to interpret and explain the 
meaning and worth of the life of the spirit in history, 
society, and the individual. We need a philosophy which 
shall have won its insight into the mysteries of the spir- 
itual life by a sympathetic, patient hearkening to the 
voices of faith and endeavor that may be heard by the ear 
attuned to the notes of tragedy and triumph, pathos and 
glory, sounded by the chosen spirits of humanity as they 


THE RECRUDESCENCE OF PAGANISM dl 


have striven all down the ages for justice, freedom, social 
peace, knowledge, and beauty. 

The moral and spiritual history of mankind is the true 
revelation of the Divine character and purpose. The 
prophets of righteousness and love, the seers of truth and 
spiritual beauty are the clearest voices of God in history. 
Theirs is a noble company. They live in us and we in 
them when we labor for the true, the just, the beautiful, 
in the associated lives of men, “God having provided some 
better thing for us, that they without us should not be 
made perfect.” 

The churches are by inheritance and choice the guard- 
ians and champions of the moral order in society. To-day 
they fight against heavy odds. It behooves them to get 
rid of unnecessary baggage, to make an end of irrelevant 
controversies, to bury dead issues concerning the source 
of their authority, etc., to combine their forces and con- 
centrate their energies on the one aim of conserving and 
enforcing the Christian moral values of civilization. 
Otherwise, the recrudescence of paganism may become the 
recrudescence of barbarism. In the midst of social and 
moral chaos a few choice spirits may find consolation and 
strength in philosophy, but for the many a vivid, pas- 
sionate, and energetic religious conviction is the condition 
of moral health and vigor. No great civilization has ever 
outlasted the demise of its religious faith. If the moral 
bases of our culture are in imminent danger, the danger 
can be averted only by a new crusade on behalf of social 
righteousness and personal integrity, animated by a re- 
ligious view of life, for which the human spirit transcends 
nature through kinship with absolute Spirit. I need not 


52. RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


remind you that here the Christian and the Jew stand 
together on the common ground of a prophetic ethical 
religion, whose controlling principle of faith and action 
is the vision of a righteous social order, the Kingdom of 
God. 

Whether in the churches or outside of them, our society 
will not be saved by those who flee for refuge from the 
confusion, unrest, and emptiness of the time to an aristo- 
eratic Deity beyond the stars, or who hug to their bosoms 
some private cult which promises deliverance from the 
turmoil and stress of the day. Our society will be saved 
by men who are fired by faith in the Kingdom of God, 
and who see, beyond nature and actual society, a Supreme 
Spiritual Power ever working in and through man’s indi- 
vidual and social experiences, and in the very darkest 
hours of his unrest and perplexity, for the fuller realiza- 
tion of that commonwealth of moral personalities, which 
is the only enduringly worthful aim of human effort, since 
it is the meaning and purpose of the entire movement 
of life. 





CHAPTER V 
THE CULTURAL FUNCTION OF RELIGION 


In primitive societies there were no distinctions drawn 
between the provinces of religion, law, morals, education, 
science, medicine and technology. The social culture of 
man was all of a piece; or, perhaps, better, it was a 
confused mixture of all the above-mentioned elements. 
Maintaining social order, healing the sick, breeding flocks 
and herds, cultivating the ground, influencing the weather, 
training the young, explaining the course of events—all 
these human interests were based on the one fundamental 
belief in mysterious animistic powers, susceptible to con- 
trol by the methods of magic and incantation. The funda- 
mental law of the evolution of human culture is the law 
of differentiation and specialization of function. One 
after another, the various cultural interests have been 
specialized and separated from the primitive matrix. 
First technology, medicine and science, then philosophy, 
then law, then morals and education, have passed out 
from under the aegis of religion to the status of separate 
and highly specialized cultural enterprises. What most 
clearly differentiates the modern standpoint from the 
medieval standpoint is this complete independence of 
specialized functions. Religion seems to have waged a 
losing battle all along the line. We no longer seek out 
the priest for scientific or philosophical explanation, for 

53 


54 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


aid in our agricultural and industrial activities, not even 
for aid in education. The priest is no longer a lawgiver. 
Some churchmen, taking alarm at this loss of religious 
control, work for church schools and colleges as the 
remedy. But the claim that a denominational, or 
“church” college is any more religious than a nonsectarian 
college will hardly bear'the light of unbiased investigation. 
The writer is familiar with both types. And just as 
there is no Presbyterian or Episcopalian brand of chem- 
istry or physics, so there is no peculiar sanctity apper- 
taining to church colleges. Our church colleges must 
make their appeal simply on the ground that they are 
good centers for an education that is universal, unbiased, 
nonsectarian. 

Nor can the attempt to reclaim the sphere of medicine 
for churchly influence be made good in the modern world. 
It is true that sound moral attitudes have a bearing on 
health, especially in the case of functional neuroses. But 
it is not true that the healing value of sound moral teach- 
ing is confined to any special form of religious belief and 
practice. 

Is there any place left for religion in the life of our 
culture, with its increasing specialization of method and 
function? Is religion to be crowded out entirely in the 
further differentiation of man’s cultural activities? Has 
religion a social function to-day? Or has its all-inclusive 
domain in earlier societies been parceled out entirely 
among the various specialized forms of culture? 

Religion, freed from entanglement with special inter- 
ests and methods, has a central réle to play in our cultural 
life. The very differentiation of interests requires that 
there be one agency to reconcile, to harmonize, to synthe- 


ee ee 


THE CULTURAL FUNCTION OF RELIGION 55 


size and focus on human well-being all the various special 
interests of man. It is the great prerogative of religion 
to humanize and spiritualize all special activities by bring- 
ing to men, in the midst of all their special interests, the 
vision of a community of spiritual interests, a community 
of ethical purpose, a community of ideal values which 
must be recognized to run through and give unity of 
direction to all the various special cultural interests. 
Without the vital energizing of a humane and spiritual 
hke-mindedness or community of ideals and values our 
highly differentiated social structure will fall to pieces. 
If the industrialist, the enterpriser, the technician, the 
‘scientist, the educator, the physician cannot find a com- 
munity of humane purpose, an ideal human value, which 
will knit up their specialized work and aims in the ser- 
vice of one overmastering humanistic social enterprise, 
then we shall have social differentiation without integra- 
tion and therefore without the necessary fundamental like- 
mindedness. We shall have to see in place of the realiza- 
tion of the community of God’s people, that disorganiza- 
tion which will result from our failures, as groups serving 
special interests, technical, professional, industrial and 
otherwise—have to see that communities, nations, man- 
kind at large, cannot live at all in these days of speciali- 
zation without a recognized and loyally accepted com- 
munity of human purpose. It is the true function of 
religion to bear witness to, to define and proclaim and to 
make effective, this fundamental community of purpose. 

All institutions, all special cultural interests, now as in 
Jesus’ own day, are made for man’s soul, not man for 
them. Jesus was the supreme humanist of the ages. The 
Kingdom of God is the embodiment of his central idea 


56 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


of an all-embracing human community of ideal aims, of 
humane values. 

The true mission of the Church is to conserve and to 
reinterpret and show the application for every age, amidst 
the ever changing social and intellectual conditions of hu- 
man society, of the great spiritual principles enumerated 
and exemplified by its founder. Jesus taught and in- 
carnated, in his deeds and his supreme act of sacrifice, 
what is at once the noblest, the most self-consistent, the 
simplest and the most heroic type of human spiritual life 
ever revealed to men. In the fragmentary sayings and 
the sketchy outlines of his life in the Gospels there is 
contained a definite, comprehensive and integral life-atti- 
tude. There is an extraordinary unity and simplicity in 
this paragon of spiritual life, and an extraordinary vi- 
tality, fecundity and adaptability in the principles it 
bodies forth. Simple though it be, it can be applied to 
everchanging and complex conditions of human culture. 
Jesus enunciated no set of laws or casuistical rules of 
conduct. He enunciated germinal moral principles of 
valuation and conduct which all issue forth from a central 
spiritual spring. 

To illustrate by two moral and social problems that are 
much in the public mind to-day and concerning which 
there is much confusion of counsel—property and seq. 
One will search in vain in the teachings or acts of Jesus 
for an endorsement or condemnation of any economic or 
legal system. Economically Jesus is neither for laissez 
fatre, moderate socialism, or extreme communism. In- 
deed, he said, “Who made me a judge or a divider over 
you?” But can there be the slightest doubt that Jesus 
explicitly meant by his attitude towards property that 


THE CULTURAL FUNCTION OF RELIGION — 57 


whatsoever property one has the ownership or use of, 
one should use as if one were only its custodian for the 
service of one’s fellows? Now, this principle has definite 
application in law and economics to meet our existing 
industrial conditions. Jesus enunciates the principle. It 
is for Christians associated together to determine and 
work for its application to the present situation. With 
regard to sex it is a sad misreading of the spirit of Jesus 
to give to his words the force even of ecclesiastical legisla- 
tion. When he said, “Whom God hath joined together 
let no man put asunder,” he had in mind more than a 
physical union. He had in mind a marriage of souls, 
the wedding of two wills, two spirits, into a deep and 
lasting community of codperating life. Physical union 
is the fleshly substructure of marriage, but it does not by 
itself make a true marriage. Physical union must be the 
outward sign of an inward and moral union for a real 
marriage to exist. To the church falls the glorious and 
gracious duty of bearing witness and applying, in every 
age, under every condition of culture, the eternally valid 
spiritual principles, the standards of value, and the mo- 
tivations of Jesus. 

These spiritual principles are at once the simplest, the 
tenderest and the most elevated that are known to men. 
Their validity is not dependent at all upon the validity 
of the traditional cosmological scheme. It makes no dif- 
ference to the worth, the pertinency, the spiritual au- 
thority of Jesus’ scale of spiritual values, how long our 
earth and heavens were in the making, by what steps, 
whether minute and many or large and few, the natural 
world we live in came to be; it makes no difference 
whether man is physically descended, through an apelike 


58 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


ancestry, from simple organisms; or was created In a 
moment by the direct hand of God; it makes no difference 
whether any physical miracle ever has occurred or not; 
it makes no difference whether Jesus was born of a virgin 
or not. To the validity of Jesus’ spiritual principles such 
questions are irrelevant. We must have some sort of 
cosmology or world-view, since we are thinking beings. 
It is my purpose in the following chapters to consider: 
(1) what are the central principles of Jesus’ life-view; 
and (2) what world-view we may adopt in the light of 
modern thought. I believe that we are entitled to adopt 
a world-view that is quite consistent with the validity of 
the life-view taught and incarnated by Jesus. But I 
register here my opinion that, even though modern thought 
forced us to adopt a world-view which left no place at 
all for a spiritual interpretation of the universe, the life- 
view of Jesus would still be the highest, the most truly 
human ideal of human conduct; the one most worthy to 
be followed even in the face of the tragic schism between 
ethical values and the universal order. Therefore, I re- 
peat, the church’s great calling now, as always, is to bear 
witness, in the midst of the perplexities and conflicts of 
civilization, to the supreme validity of that unique and 
wholly consistent type of spiritual life of which the basic 
principles are found in the New Testament. This type 
of life is not antiquated, nor is it impossible to be lived 
to-day. But it must not be misrepresented and endangered 
by being confused with casuistical or legalistic interpreta- 
tions. It is not a set of rules, not even a moral code. 
It is a spirit reducible to no casuistical system, expressible 
in the codes of no police state or police church; a spirit 
of moral and intellectual freedom, integrity, purity of 


THE CULTURAL FUNCTION OF RELIGION 59 


motive and aspiration; a spirit of selfless devotion and 
service to all things good and true and beautiful. 

It is the function of religion to interpret and bear 
witness to the humane and spiritual values of the various 
activities and interests of culture, to bring these to a 
focus and to view them, each and all, in the light of a 
unitary and coherent doctrine of man’s ethical vocation 
and spiritual destiny. Thus the church can lift the vari- 
ous interests of culture out of their onesidedness, and 
save each one from degenerating into a materialized 
mechanism. 

Without faith in the spiritual dignity, worth, respon- 
sibility and destiny of the human soul, all activities of 
civilization must degenerate into panderers to a sensuous 
selfishness; into a self-seeking on the part of the indi- 
vidual, the special group and vocational class. What 
becomes of industry, capital, nationality, even education, 
unless each interest 1s viewed and guided in the light of 
its humane and moral function as serving to upbuild the 
human spirit ? 

So far, then, is it from being the case that, with highly 
specialized activities, the place of religion becomes vacant ; 
it becomes more urgent that there should be one unifying 
inspiring agency which will judge and place and guide 
each special interest with reference to its due position in 
the whole of the human spiritual order. 

In sum, the spiritual mission of the Church of Christ 
in this day and in the future is to bear witness to the 
wholeness, the integrity of the spirit of man; to the 
supremacy, the dignity and worth of the spirit in man as 
revealed by Jesus; to test every activity and interest of 
elvilization by this central standard. And to be the rally- 


60 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


ing point and source of that moral dynamic which can 
come only from faith in a spiritual greatness of which 
man is capable. In order that it may the better fulfill 
this mission the church should give up the attempt to 
make pronouncements on the origin and course of the 
natural universe. It should discard outworn cosmologies, 
and anthropologies, and: theologies and Christologies that 
are inextricably enmeshed with outworn cosmologies. It 
will best serve its Master and humanity by ceasing to 
dispute concerning creation, evolution, physical miracles, 
the fall of man, the metaphysical interpretation of the 
person of Christ; and by dedicating itself in single-mind- 
edness to the great vocation of making the mind of Christ 
prevail in the family, the community, in industry, in 
education, in politics and in the international order. 

It is the business of science (using this term in the 
broadest sense) to analyze and determine the structures 
and modes of operation of the physical order, the vital 
order and the human historical and social order. Science 
is always in quest of precise and minute analysis of 
processes and of formulas which will most adequately 
describe the interplay of the elemental processes, Accu- 
rate and detailed description and generalization, which 
will make possible the understanding of the processes, and 
their practical prevision and control, are the tasks of 
science. The final evaluation of man’s life, the interpreta- 
tion and organization of life’s meanings and values and 
the furnishing of guiding principles, the quickening of 
the motives to realize the good life, belong to ethics, re- 
ligion and philosophy. 

Religion needs not to trouble its head over questions of 
temporal origins or the precise character and rate at which 


THE CULTURAL FUNCTION OF RELIGION 61 


the temporal order moves either in the field of external 
nature or human history. The supremely important issue 
for religion is not how the physical world and man have 
arrived where they are, but how human life, in its indi- 
vidual and social aspects, may acquire the fullest, most 
harmonious and enduring values, may be filled with the 
most permanent meaning, may be endued with spirit and 
power to see and achieve and hold whatsoever things are 
pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are 
of good report. 


L Sault a me 


Mean 
i 





PART II 


THE RELIGION OF JESUS 





CHAPTER VI 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE ETHICS OF WORLDLY 
CULTURE 


The Kingdom of God is the setting for all the sayings 
of Jesus. It is the framework of the entire Gospel. The 
disciples are to be members of the Kingdom. Only as a 
member of the Kingdom can one enjoy the true and 
eternal life. The conditions of life in the Kingdom are 
simple but severe; easy for the single-minded, hard for 
the double-minded. A heroic moral attitude is required. 
He who would be a member of the Kingdom must be 
ready absolutely to uproot the impulses of vengeful anger, 
love for money and love for worldly power. He must 
strictly rule his sensual nature. Utter integrity and 
purity of motive, truthfulness and self-forgetfulness are 
demanded. Forgiveness of injuries, the constant practice 
of fellowship, and service even unto death, if necessary, 
are required. The most emphatic stress is laid on the 
spiritual worth of the individual person. The most ex- 
alted ideal of moral perfection is held up: “Be ye per- 
fect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”” Human be- 
ings have in them the potency to realize divine sonship. 
Their exalted vocation is to become in very truth sons 
of God, to develop and live by the very qualities that are 
most divine. And this perfection, this divinity in man, 
is to be realized in the life of human brotherhood. Jesus’ 

65 


66 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


ideal order differs from all merely humanitarian ideals 
of brotherhood, inasmuch as the life of the community 
of the sons of God has its absolute basis, its source and 
its goal, in the complete service of God’s Creative and 
Holy Will. 

The sharpest opposition is set up between the motives, 
ends and values that rule in the Kingdom of God and 
those that obtain in the life of this present world. The 
members of the Kingdom cannot serve both God and 
Mammon. They must not seek first the goods of this 
world; they must not work for earthly rewards and expect 
wages in proportion to the amount of work done or time 
spent in God’s service. Worldly wealth is despised, it is 
a hindrance: “How hardly shall a rich man enter the 
kingdom of God.” The one test of greatness is the spirit 
of unstinted service: “Whosoever will be great among 
you let him be the servant of all.” Jesus refused to have 
anything to do with legal disputes. “Who made me a 
judge or divider over you?’ He asks. He refused to 
be entangled in any way with Roman administration. 
He told his followers not to labor for the meat that per- 
isheth. He warned them against being anxious in regard 
to food and clothing, or unduly concerned in regard to 
their futures. He appears to have expected that the King- 
dom, which He came to inaugurate, would soon be estab- 
lished in all its fullness by the direct act of God, in a 
miraculous manner; and that the affairs of the present 
worldly order would be brought to a sudden end. Therefore 
He takes no account of worldly culture. He does not con- 
cern himself directly with industry or economics or poli- 
tics, with science or art or letters. After His departure 
His disciples clearly lived for a time in the daily expecta- 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 67 


tion of the coming of the Kingdom. All worldly concerns 
belong to the fashion of this world which passeth away. 
“The night is far spent, the day is at hand.” What need 
have those who live in daily expectation of the establish- 
ment of an absolutely new order to concern themselves 
with property, wealth, statecraft, science, art or phil- 
osophy? The first Christian communities lived a simple 
and austere communal life, indifferent to the passing in- 
terests of the world around them. 

But as time wore on and years passed into decades, and 
decades passed into centuries, and the Kingdom did not 
appear in its miraculous completeness, the disciples of 
the new life had to effect a compromise with the affairs 
of worldly culture. They had to come to terms with the 
life of Greco-Roman civilization, with Greek thought, 
with the life of the city and the empire. They had to 
recognize and try to bring under the Christian ideal of 
life: marriage and the family, worldly vocation and 
trade, education, political life, art and philosophy. They 
gave to these worldly interests a lower place than the 
specifically spiritual qualities. Because of man’s sinful 
nature, the life in the worldly order must be carried out. 
Marriage, industry, vocation, law and the political order 
were means for regulating this lower order. They are 
assigned moral values subservient to the “religious” order 
of life. The medieval Church worked out a compre- 
hensive scheme of moral values. They accepted and re- 
fined and elevated the Greek and Roman virtues of civi- 
lized life, crowning them with the higher and specifically 
Christian virtues of faith, hope and love. If the Gospel 
was somewhat secularized in this process, the ethics of 
the worldly order were both elevated and deepened in 


68 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


content, by being brought under the influence of the Chris- 
tian vision of an absolute and eternal life, in which the 
soul of man may share. 

The problem that confronted the ancient and medieval 
Church confronts Christianity to-day in an even more 
acute form. The moral problems of industry and voca- 
tion, of the whole economic order, of the political order 
in community, nation and the international world, are far 
more complex and compelling than they were in the days 
of ancient and medieval Christianity. The life of 
culture and education, the activities of science, art 
and letters have increased manifold. The civilized 
world to-day, with its immense complexity of interests 
and manifold and insistent activities, has its own stand- 
ards of moral values; these do not constitute a consistent 
and unified system. There is an acute conflict between 
the interests and the moral attitudes of different groups. 
For example, between the interests of organized labor and 
of organized capital, between the interests of industrial 
production and of self-development and between the in- 
terests of nations. There is much disagreement as to 
the right relation between the economic interests and the 
cultural interests. How far, for example, should material 
goods be made subservient or instrumental to the promo- 
tion of liberal education, science, scholarship, art and liter- 
ature? If we grant that economic goods should be instru- 
mental to the goods of the spirit, where is our ideal, 
where are our standards for valuing the latter? The 
answer is the ideal of the harmonious development and 
enjoyment of all natural human capacities. 

It is undoubtedly true that the prevailing ethical values 
of our contemporary world are immanent. The good life 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 69 


consists, from a modern point of view, in the develop- 
ment and enjoyment by man, as fully and harmoniously 
as possible, of all the native capacities of his being here 
on earth. He does not regard the life of industry and 
culture in this worldly order as a result of the perversion 
of the spirit through the sin of Adam. The natural 
capacities are capacities for good, and civilization is the 
process of development of these capacities. Therefore, 
the worldly life is good. The modern man does not look 
for the good life through renunciation, self-sacrifice, pov-. 
erty, celibacy or the life of an anchorite. His guiding 
principle is the unfolding and perfection of his immanent 
human powers. Industry, wealth, education, science, art, 
letters, are all means to this end. All are good in their 
proper relations. The most serious obstacle in the way 
of the acceptance of the Christian ideal les in its appar- 
ent indifference to the values of worldly culture and at 
times its hostility. The really crucial problem for Chris- 
tianity to-day is, as it has always been, since it entered 
into the life of worldly culture, an ethical problem. What 
place is there in the modern world, with its complex, 
varied and rich activities and interests, for this simple 
and austere superhuman ideal of Jesus, the Kingdom of 
God? Must the modern world leave it behind as the 
dream of uncultivated Judean peasants, irrelevant to our 
worldly culture? On the answer to this question depends 
the fate of Christianity and the fate of worldly culture. 
Has the modern man lost the yearning for the eternal ? 
Has he lost the pilgrim soul? Is he so comfortably en- 
sconced in this present order that the words, “we have 
no continuing city here,” and, “we are strangers and 
sojourners here,”’ have lost all meaning for him? Can 


70 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


he be fully satisfied with the temporal and transitory, and 
relegate the things that are eternal and invisible to the 
place of vanished dreams that belong to the childhood 
of the race? Suppose the world throws away the simple, 
austere, exalted, yet warm and loving vision of Jesus, 
the vision of an eternal order of spiritual persons, what 
becomes of human culture? Then it seems to me the 
economic life becomes simply a fatuous and spiritually 
empty struggle between contending groups over the flesh- 
pots of Egypt. Then worldly wealth becomes a means to 
selfish gratification of the lust for worldly comfort and 
power, and the process of its acquisition will breed even 
more acute social disturbances. Then the amusements of 
man’s leisure and economic surplus will be merely means 
of satisfaction for the human animal. Art and letters, 
degenerating into refined and overelaborate ministrations 
to the sensual beast, the reeling faun, will turn to dust 
and ashes. There will be no spiritual health in these 
things. Even science, a great instrument for the further- 
ance of human values, becomes a heartless and soulless 
thing if humanity cannot guide itself by the vision of 
eternal values. I see no choice between a materialism, 
however refined and elaborated, and the recognition of 
the validity of a superhuman principle working in the 
human soul. For the nature of man is a paradox. He 
as a dual being; he is a physiological mechanism endowed 
with conscience and an undying thirst for communion 
with perfection. He is a creature of time and yet he 
seeks the eternal. Is it not true after all that, as Chris- 
tianity teaches and as indeed Plato taught, the truly hu- 
man in man is his urge toward the superhuman, and that 
the crown and completion of a moral humanism is attain- 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 71 


able only through the faith and firm resolve which anchors 
the spirit of man in the superhuman world of the King- 
dom of God? 

If, indeed, this be true, the challenge of the world to 
Christianity to-day is to redeem it from spiritual sloth 
and sensuality, from low material aims, from practical 
materialism and a refined egotism, by lovingly but sternly 
bringing the interests, activities and values of worldly 
culture to judgment before the bar of the Kingdom of 
God. Worldly cultures come and go—none is sacrosant 
or absolutely permanent; modern industrialism and com- 
mercialism, modern democracy, science and culture are 
not exempt from the law of change and decay. They 
all belong to the fashion of this world which ever passeth 
away. What endures through all change are God and 
the community of the sons of God. The Kingdom of 
God, which is the eternal commonwealth of spiritual per- 
sons living in fellowship, in codperation or active love 
one with another—such is the message of Jesus to this 
time, as to all times. 

The crux of worldly culture and of Christianity to-day 
does not lie in the answers to such questions as these: 
Does Christianity stand or fall with the belief in the 
verbal inerrancy or scientific accuracy of the Scriptures, 
or with the belief in the miraculous intervention of an 
extramundane Deity? It does not even he in the accept- 
ance or rejection of metaphysical dogmas in regard to the 
relation of the man Jesus to the eternal God. Those who 
hammer away at such things to-day, whether they be 
adherents or foes of the Christian Gospel, are fighting 
battles that have nothing to do with the main issue. If 
they are adherents of Christianity then they are wasting 


72 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


their ammunition on stragglers and camp-followers. The 
main battle is going on elsewhere. 

The critical problem for Christianity and civilization 
is this: Can the natural capacities and impulses of man 
and all the manifold interests, values and activities which 
grow out of them and which make our culture what it 
is, be transfused with the ethical ideals of the Kingdom ? 
Can the desire for earthly goods, for family life, for social 
life,-for knowledge and refinement and aesthetic enjoy- 
ment, for power and influence, be transmuted into the 
lordlier ideal of Jesus? Can the moral values of nature 
and culture be made, not a substitute for, but the first 
initiation into, the life of the Spirit? Can the values 
of an immanent humane culture be so transformed into 
the values of spiritual love, joy, peace, meekness, gentle- 
ness, soberness, chastity, that the things which are seen 
and temporal become the express images of the things 
which are unseen and eternal? No really intelligent 
person to-day believes that the natural impulses and the 
humane culture which is their outgrowth are the results 
of sin and, therefore, are evil. The problem of Chris- 
tianity is to take up these humane values, to ennoble and 
to transfigure them with the glow of the Eternal. 


Notr.—It would take much more space than I can give here, 
to discuss the problems of New Testament criticism. In regard 
to the Gospels the most critical question is this—what was Jesus’ 
teaching in regard to the apocalytic expectation of the sudden, 
speedy and miraculous installation of the Kingdom? and, in this 
connection, did he regard himself as the Son of Man who was 
to establish the Kingdom? I must be content to state my opinion 
briefly on both these points. In several places Jesus is reported 
as foretelling the imminence of the Kingdom in all its complete- 
ness. 





THE KINGDOM OF GOD 73 


See Matthew x: 23, xvi: 28, xxiv: 3-xxv: 33, especially xxiv: 34, 
xxvi: 29, 64; Mark ix:1, xii: 3-37; Luke ix: 27, xxi: 5-36. 

The literal truth of such sayings is not incompatible with the 
other parables of the Kingdom in which it is represented as 
already present in its beginnings and to increase rapidly; for 
example, Matthew xii: 1-9, 24-33; Mark iv: 26-32; Luke viii: 4- 
15, xi: 18-21. 

It is incompatible with such sayings as Luke xvii: 20, 21. 

But, if Jesus foretold the sudden and complete advent of the 
Kingdom in the near future, as he is reported to have done, then 
he was mistaken. The Kingdom has never come in this literal 
fashion and never will while man and nature manifest the modes 
of behavior that they have in all the records of geology, paleon- 
tology, and history. 

There are three alternatives on this critical question: 

1. Jesus meant the apocalyptic sayings literally. Then he was 
mistaken. History has proved him deluded. Traditionalists, who 
take everything literally as verbally true and authenticated di- 
rectly from God, try to escape the conclusion that Jesus was 
mistaken by having recourse to some kind of millennialism. The 
Kingdom has not yet come suddenly and with miraculous por- 
tents, but it will come some time. But if Jesus spoke all the 
words attributed to him and they are all literally true, messages 
from God then he must have said to his own immediate disciples 
“There be some here of them that stand by, which shall in no 
wise taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God come with 
power,” Mark ix:1; see also Mark xii: 30, 31; Matthew x: 23, 
xvi: 28, xxiv: 34, xxvi:29; Luke ix:27 and xxi:32. I omit 
reference to the Gospel of John since it is probably much later 
than the first three and has a different purpose. 

Thus the traditionalists’ assumption is refuted out of their own 
mouths. The supreme difficulty in attributing the apocalyptic 
sayings to Jesus is that they are not in harmony with his other 
utterances in regard to the spiritual, present, inward, and grow- 
ing nature of the Kingdom. 

2. Jesus used these phrases as an accommodation to the minds 
of his hearers which were charged with apocalyptic Messianic 
expectations, but meant them figuratively. This attitude is not 
in harmony with the straightforward way in which, even in the 
parables, Jesus is reported as expressing himself. Would he 
deliberately have lent himself to such complete misunderstand- 


74 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


ing? Such an assumption seems to me out of harmony with the 
utter simplicity and integrity of his nature. 

3. Jesus never prophesied the apocalyptic advent. The words 
put into his mouth are due either to a complete misunderstanding 
of what he did say; or they have got into the Gospels because 
the oral tradition was handed down by Hebrew disciples who 
reverted, after Jesus’ death, to their old apocalyptic beliefs. 
John the Baptist had doubtless strengthened these beliefs. This 
reversion was motivated by the belief so strongly evident in 
Matthew’s Gospel that Jesus was the Messiah and would return 
soon. This view of their origin comports best with the general 
teaching of Jesus in regard to the Kingdom as a life of free 
fellowship grounded on an inward and spiritual personal attitude 
and growing gradually. 

The other difficult question is this—Did Jesus regard himself 
as the Messiah? Was the Son of Man a Messianic title? Many 
volumes have been written on this subject. A strong case for 
the negative is made out by Nathaniel Schmidt in The Prophet 
of Nazareth. 

It seems to me that the best explanation of the trial and eruci- 
fixion of Jesus is that he was regarded as a false pretender to 
the Messiahship, by zealous Jews who were incensed at the com- 
pletely spiritual and nonpolitical turn that he gave to the Mes- 
sianie expectation. Jesus probably did not intend, at first, to 
claim Messiahship. Perhaps he never regarded himself as the 
Messiah. By the “Son of Man” he may have meant simply him- 
self as a type of the new and universal humanity. He rebuked 
Peter and he charged his disciples not to say that he was the 
Messiah. One thing is clear: if he regarded himself as the Mes- 
siah, when an open admission was forced on him because of his 
power with the people, he repudiated its worldly and political 
features. 

The Synoptic Gospels (the first three) are undoubtedly, in 
what they report of Jesus, more nearly literal verbatim accounts 
of the sayings and doings of Jesus than the fourth Gospel. On 
the other hand the fourth Gospel probably contains some true 
records which escaped the other three. As an interpretation of 
the essential spirit of Jesus and of the spiritual significance of 
his gospel and work, the Way, the Truth and the Life, John’s 
Gospel and the Epistles are supreme among the New Testament 
writings. 





THE KINGDOM OF GOD 75 


Dean Inge says that the fourth Gospel gives an Incarnation 
theology, whereas the first three give an apotheosis theology. 
These two concepts are not mutually exclusive. Apotheosis and 
Incarnation are two aspects of the same spiritual principle. But, 
clearly, if the significance of Jesus lies in his embodying, as 
well as teaching what God, or the Cosmic Spirit is like, namely, 
complete self-imparting Love, then the higher truth is in the 
Incarnation theology. Unless there was, and continues to be, 
Spiritual Incarnation, that is, unless the Supreme Spirit really 
has manifested Himself and continues to manifest Himself in 
human nature, apotheosis is naught but the projection of human 
wishes and longings on an inexorable and heartless universe. 
Those who accept the faith of Jesus, and feel the regenerating 
and comforting power of the Christ Spirit, find in the Johannine 
writings the most adequate interpretation of the meaning of 
Jesus’s life, sacrifice and continued life. 


CHAPTER VII 
ETHICAL HUMANISM” AND THE ETHICS OF JESUS 


The ethical standpoint of modern humanism, with re- 
spect to the individual life, involves the modification of 
that ascetic dualism of body and soul, which is so out- 
standing a characteristic of much of the thought of the 
dying culture of the ancient world. It is sufficient here 
to refer to Gnosticism, Manicheanism and the decadent 
forms of Neo-Platonism, to remind the reader of that 
soul-sickness and loss of nerve which so infected the 
Graeco-Roman culture in its expiring days; and which 
made great inroads on early Christian ethics. Jesus was 
no ascetic dualist. Nevertheless, soon even St. Paul was 
infected by it. The Ebionitic sect went over wholly to 
it. It left a deep impress on monasticism. St. Augustine 
was much influenced by it. Through its influence the 
sharp contrast between the new social order of the ‘‘King- 
dom” and the “world,” that is, the existing social order, 
as it appears in the teachings of Jesus, was transformed 
into the irreconcilable opposition between flesh and spirit, 
body and soul. Christian thought has not yet wholly 
freed itself from this ethical-metaphysical dualism. 

The prevailing modern view of the relation of body and 
soul is that, although distinct and having differing values 
in the total life of the self, they are not warring powers. 
The life of the soul or spirit arises and functions only 

76 








ETHICAL HUMANISM AND ETHICS OF JESUS 77 


on the basis of the bodily structure. The soul, as Aris- 
totle put it in a truly modern fashion, is the entelechy or 
meaning and value; or, one may say, the conscious pur- 
port of the body. Body and soul are related as structure 
and function, organ and directive meaning or purpose, 
house and householder. The body is the dwelling place 
and instrument of the spirit. The sensory or receptor 
organs and the motor or effector organs are the means 
through which the mind builds itself up, enlarges, en- 
riches and organizes itself, by submission to and action 
on its physical and social environments. The mind be- 
comes nothing meaningful except in so far as it transcends 
itself, denies itself, by going beyond its own physical 
or natural beginnings and living in self-forgetting inter- 
course with its world. The mind, working through the 
brain, recelves impressions; it discriminates, selects, re- 
members and organizes these impressions. By its own 
analytic and synthetic or creative energies the mind 
utilizes the materials derived from without; and thus 
makes itself at home in the world, enjoys breadth, depth 
and harmony of life, by experiencing pain and joy, love 
and fellowship, beauty and devotion. But this “spiritual” 
life is possible only in so far as the individual mind “dies” 
to its natural ego by throwing itself into and forgetting 
itself in the active wrestle with physical nature and, still 
more, by living in active service of social and spiritual 
ends. The soul is saved, not by withdrawal from nature 
and human society, but by the fullest and most self-for- 
getting activity and service in this twofold environment. 
“He that seeketh his life shall lose it, and he that loseth 
his life shall find it.” All genuine mental and spiritual 
growth illustrates the truth of this principle. 


78 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


Man is a wondrously complex individual, a spiritual 
organism, compacted of bodily energies, passional energies 
and mental or spiritual energies. No sharp line of de- 
marcation can be drawn between the typical energies of 
his being. The health and sanity of the spirit, and the 
health of the living body. cannot be dissevered. The spirit 
life is richer, more inclusive, more creative and, therefore, 
more significant and enduring, than the body life A 
vigorous spirit may dwell in a weak body. Nevertheless, 
the function of the body is to minister to the harmonious 
life of the spirit. Therefore, the care of the body is 
essential to both bodily health and spiritual power. If 
exaggerated emphasis on the sensuous functions is ruinous 
to the spirit, it is no less harmful to bodily health. If 
a one-sided development of certain mental functions, such 
as imagination out of touch with reality and dwelling in 
a cloudland of fancies and distorted desires, is injurious 
to the body, it is even more harmful to sanity of spirit. 

The life of the spirit, if it is to be well rounded, full 
and harmonious, must include the activity of all the main 
functions of our mental being. Accurate observation, 
thorough thinking and the satisfaction of the powers of 
aesthetic creation and enjoyment are just as necessary 
to spiritual well-being as the cultivation of moral feeling 
and volition and religious devotion. In fact, all the main 
activities of the spirit naturally tend to blend into one 
full-orbed whole, which is the spirit’s consummation, 
reached in aesthetic experience, religion and philosophy. 
Religion is not truly a specialized department of spiritual 
life. It is the full, total and harmonious union and ful- 
fillment of the human functions at their highest power, 
recognized as the self-revelation and self-realization of 


PL a ae ee De ree ed 





ETHICAL HUMANISM AND ETHICS OF JESUS 79 


God, the Cosmic Spirit, through the human person in 
the human community or fellowship. 

The good life, then, always implies completeness, in- 
tegrity or wholeness, achieved through the continual self- 
transcendence by the individual of his already attained 
life. He must be always “forgetting those things which 
are behind” and “pressing forward towards the mark for 
the prize of his high calling”; always forgetting who and 
what he is; always dying to live more fully. The good 
life does not consist in the suppression of impulses for 
suppression’s sake. Not all impulses are on the same 
level of values. There must be subordination and subli- 
mation, repression and even suppression, in the interest of 
harmonious wholeness as a member of the spiritual body 
of humanity and the universe. The manners and degrees, 
the times and places, in which the “physical” or biologi- 
cal needs of the organism are to be satisfied, must take 
account of the higher claims of the intellectual and aes- 
thetic life and be subject to the social or moral conditions 
under which alone these needs can be most harmoniously 
satisfied by all members of society. or example, the 
sex-impulse must not be exaggerated or given a preéminent 
place. It is to be sublimated or refined and harmonized 
with the other main interests of human nature. Love 
should sublimate, through sympathy, loyalty and the 
spirit of comradeship and service. It thus becomes an 
avenue of approach to beauty and harmony of spirit. 

The good life is nothing apart from the concrete 
dynamic impulses of human personality. The good life 
is the progressing integration of human nature in the 
ways which I have indicated. It is the harmonious articu- 
lation of the individual’s impulses with one another and 


80 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


with the physical and social conditions of human exist- 
ence. The evil life is the lfe of a divided self—one 
rent asunder by conflicting and unreconciled passions and 
interests. The good life for the individual is the life of 
a self that is forever being unified. 

In order to realize the good, human beings must be- 
come partners in all that makes for individual integrity 
and social harmony. Balance, measure, proportion, were 
the ideals of the great Greek thinkers and they should be 
ours. We must make ourselves at home with nature as 
well as with our fellows. We must learn to seek and’ 
enjoy beauty everywhere. We must learn to enjoy knoewl- 
edge and rejoice in its increase. 

We must participate in all the cultural interests of 
human nature. All the arts—music, poetry, painting, 
sculpture and architecture—are moral interests. All 
science and its applications to human well-being are 
means of spiritual development. For the good life is the 
integral and harmonious self-realization of all human 
powers. The spirit is the supreme power of integration 
or articulation of human powers. 

I think that, in principle, this was Jesus’ conception. 
He was no ascetic kill-joy. He went to merrymakings. 
He sat down to meat with publicans and sinners. His 
enemies called him a gluttonous man and a winebibber. 
When asked why his disciples did not fast, he replied— 
“The children of the bridechamber do not fast while the 
bridegroom is with them.” He taught the futility of mere 
repression for repression’s sake. When the soul is empty, 
although swept and garnished, seven other devils worse 
than the first enter and dwell there. He emphasized again 
and again the supreme importance of the mental life, the 





ETHICAL HUMANISM AND ETHICS OF JESUS 81 


realm of thought and imagination. He warned against 
the danger of submerged but not expunged impulses. He 
anticipated the principle of psychoanalysis. He warned 
his hearers again and again in regard to the divided self 
—‘‘a house divided against itself cannot stand.” “No 
man can serve two masters.” “If thine eye be single thy 
whole body shall be full of light.” 

There is an austere strain in the teaching of Jesus. 
“If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” “If thine hand 
offend thee, cut it off. . . . For it is better for thee to 
enter into life maimed.” But the end of this severity 
is to enter into Life. The ideal of conduct is set very 
high in the Sermon on the Mount—impossibly high, some 
would say. But there must be a strain of austerity and 
self-denial in any genuine moral ideal. In order that 
wholeness and harmony of spiritual life may be progres- 
sively attained, it is necessary that some of our natural 
impulses be subordinated and repressed or even on occa- 
sion denied and suppressed. Any moral ideal which over- 
looks “the war in our members” and the urgent need of 
self-denial and self-forgetting preaches confusion and dis- 
harmony in place of order and harmony. Even Goethe, 
commonly regarded as a modern pagan, said: ‘“‘Thou must 
renounce.” ‘The life of man as a spiritual being, which is 
the only human life, is a struggle, a perpetual self-tran- 
scendence. “Vivere est militare.’ The man who would 
be good, in the sense of being whole and sane, must curb 
and renounce many desires and impulses. 

But Jesus is no ascetic for asceticism’s sake. Repres- 
sion and renunciation, as taught by him, are steps towards 
the more abundant life—are for a more inclusive and 
harmonious good, All self-control and self-denial have, 


82 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


as their purpose and fruition, individual integrity and 
social harmony. 

In short, for Jesus, as for the best modern thought, 
spiritual articulation, integrity, wholeness, is the uitimate 
nature of the good.’ | 


1 See the fine article by Professor J. W. Scott. ‘‘ Psychology and 
ldealistic Philosophy,’’ Philosophical Review, XXXII, I, pp. 18-36. 





CHAPTER VIII 
SOCIAL ETHICS AND THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS 


We are living between two social orders—the one pass- 
ing away, the other in gestation. The greatest and most 
far and deep reaching, in consequences, of all the social 
revolutions in the history of mankind has been the indus- 
trial revolution. This revolution has coincided with the 
change from a social order ruled by custom, hereditary 
privilege and traditional class institutions to an epoch of 
economic, political and moral individualism. The rapid 
development, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 
of large-scale industrialism was made possible by the re- 
moval of the fetters of custom and legal restraint from 
industry. Free competition, freedom of contract and the 
unlimited right of private association for industrial ends 
made for the enormous development of the large-scale 
industry, which was rendered possible by the mechanical 
inventions which followed thick and fast upon the appli- 
cation of steam to industry and transportation. 

But large-scale industrialism has given control over the 
economic well-being, and therefore over the very lives, of 
millions of their fellow beings to small, privately asso- 
ciated groups of industrial and financial magnates. This 
control, by the few, of the means of existence for the 
many is the most powerful and far-reaching form of eco- 
nomic feudalism that our western civilization has yet wit- 

83 


84 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


nessed. It is being checked only by the association of 
labor groups for the purpose of waging economic warfare 
with their capitalistic masters. It will do no good to 
mince matters. No other force than the organized 
power of labor has or can now check the greed of stock- 
holders, financial manipulators and captains of industry. 

After the temporary diversion of the World War, which 
arose as a by-product of this economic struggle, the con- 
tending forces are arming anew for the battle. No dis- 
interested and thoughtful student of the present social 
disorder can believe that the existing methods of trench 
warfare, alternating with drives into enemy territory, can 
continue indefinitely. Hither our present economic sys- 
tem will disintegrate and be followed by a dictatorship of 
force or a humaner and juster order must be established. 
Ahead of us there loom the alternatives—either violent 
revolution or ethical evolution towards the democratiza- 
tion and humanization of production and distribution. 
There is now no middle ground. Either political democ- 
racy will find a way to industrial democracy or the resis- 
tive powers of the economic reactionaries will prove strong 
enough to dam the current until chaos is let loose. Peace 
cannot ensue from the continuance of armed conflict be- 
tween economic groups. 

Both the capital-groups and the labor-groups are ani- 
mated too much by the motive of acquisitiveness. The 
chief hope for industrial peace lies in the substitution for 
this motive of the motive of codperative service in the dis- 
charge of their social functions of production and distri- 
bution. Capital and labor should function as instruments 
for the sustenance and improvement of the social fabric. 

Peace may come by way of a much larger application 





SOCIAL ETHICS AND TEACHINGS OF JESUS 85 


of the principle of voluntary copartnership; or by way 
of a much increased public ownership and operation; or 
by way of increased state regulation of privately owned 
industry; or, what is more likely, by a combination of all 
these methods. One thing seems certain—economic in- 
dividualism is in its death throes. Such maxims as “This 
is my private business and I will run it as I please’ will 
not stand when applied to the great scale industries which 
produce goods of common need. Economic wealth to-day 
is the product of the joint labor of so many hands and 
brains that it is no longer possible to determine precisely 
what are the fruits of the labor of each individual apart 
from his fellows. Economically, as well as in other ways, 
we members of the modern industrial society are all mem- 
bers one of another to a greater extent than has ever been 
the case in any previous form of civilization. 

The fundamental trouble, ethically speaking, with our 
present economic system is this: whereas it requires the 
joint efforts and skills of many hands and brains to pro- 
duce goods, the business is usually conducted and the earn- 
ings distributed on the principle of private and individu- 
alistic control. The economic values of the materials and 
products are due chiefly to social codperation; they are 
social values, but the distribution of the profits is de- 
termined chiefly by those who privately control the capital 
stock. We have collectivism in production, rampant in- 
dividualism in distribution. Until we have a much more 
equitable social control of distribution our social unrest 
will grow apace. 

I am here concerned only with fundamental ethical 
principles. I recognize that their application involves 
many puzzling problems that can be solved only by patient 


86 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


investigation and experimentation. But we must have 
guiding ethical principles if we expect to go forward in- 
telligently towards a better social order. 

It used to be thought that ethics was concerned pri- 
marily with the individual. His business was to get wis- 
dom, happiness, goodness or salvation, by and for himself. 
Conscience was conceived to be the guide by which the 
individual might steer a safe course in his own boat. No 
man was his brother’s keeper. Even the Christian Gospel 
was regarded as a vessel which the individual might get 
aboard and save himself from eternal perdition. We have 
learned, in these days, from the history of morals, that 
the ethical concepts expressed in popular judgments and 
enshrined in laws and political systems reflect the whole 
economic and social order in which they arose. The in- 
dividualistic ethics embodied in our legal practice and in 
the interpretations of our Constitution and laws are 
echoes of the individualistic type of society, in which our 
nation had its birth and earlier developments. The so- 
called “natural rights” of private property and free con- 
tract, of unrestricted competition, the right of a freeman 
to labor where he will (which generally means the right 
of a nonunion man to work in an “open” shop that is 
closed to union men)—all these things, and the universal 
principles of “reason” or “nature” by which lawyers and 
judges deduce conclusions that bolster up economic indi- 
vidualism, are survivals from the age of lacssez faire, of 
unregulated competition and combination. 

If a society is to prosper and endure it must be con- 
trolled by ethical principles that are adequate to make 
that type of society a human order; not by traditional 
ethical maxims that are no longer effective ministrants to 


| 
| 
) 
| 
4 
| 
L 
; 





SOCIAL ETHICS AND TEACHINGS OF JESUS 87 


the human life. The manifoldness and complexity of the 
strands of human interdependence which, under our pres- 
ent industrial and economic life, tie human individuals 
together into a vast, pulsating superorganism, into a com- 
munity of action, feeling and destiny so intimate and 
all-pervasive that St. Paul’s great words in regard to the 
body which is one living whole of many codperating mem- 
bers are literal truth, require that we have a new social 
ethics to guide and control the activities of this social 
superorganism, 

What principles of social ethics are implied in the trans- 
formation of our collectivistic economic life into a more 
humane and genuinely democratic social order? (1) 
Since every working member contributes, in a measure 
that cannot be accurately determined, to the welfare of 
the whole of society, every individual thus contributing 
is entitled, by virtue of his sheer humanity, to the con- 
ditions of a decent livelihood. This means a decent living 
wage for moderate hours of labor. It implies, for a ma- 
ture man, an income sufficient to enable him to nurture a 
family under decent living conditions and to give his 
children a fair opportunity for an education. (2) Since 
the welfare of society as a whole depends on each member 
doing his bit, it is the duty of every competent individual 
to contribute as much as he can to the social wealth. It 
is the right of organized society to insist upon his ful- 
fillment of this duty. (38) More scope must be given, in 
the conduct of the common life, for the exercise of human 
individuality, for the expression of the constructive and 
other human impulses. This was one of the greatest 
values of the older American life, which is now fast pass- 
ing away. No society can prosper and be permanent in 


88 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


which there is not wide opportunity for the expression of 
diverse human powers. The true meaning of individual 
liberty is opportunity for the realization and enjoyment 
of one’s native human capacities. These exist in diverse 
degrees and combinations, and are the raw materials of 
our personalities. (4) There should be a much greater 
approach to economic equality, but not complete equality. 
Diverse individuals, with diverse powers and occupations, 
require differing periods of preparation, differing hours 
and conditions of work, differing ways of spending their 
leisure time. A scientist, an artist, a teacher and a hand- 
worker require very different periods and kinds of train- 
ing, conditions of labor and of recreation. Beyond what 
is required for the training and exercise of one’s special 
capacities for the fitting discharge of one’s functions, there 
is no ethical justification for inequality of reward. Noth- 
ing more grotesquely illustrates the disease of acquisitive- 
ness which so infects our industrial society to-day than 
the disparities between the rewards of an artist, poet or 
scientist, on the one hand, and the rewards of an indus- 
trial or financial magnate, on the other hand. No wonder 
that, analogous to the antediluvian age in the earth’s his- 
tory, we produce commercial and mechanical monsters 
and spiritual pygmies. (5) The surplus of wealth, over 
and above what is necessary to meet the above conditions, 
should be devoted to the common good—to enhancing the 
educational and cultural or spiritual opportunities open 
to all. 

Freedom to starve one’s creative impulses, freedom to 
choose either dire poverty or a maimed and stunted life, 
is a sham freedom. Freedom to assert oneself only by a 
fierce egotism and a ruthless cunning in the economic 





SOCIAL ETHICS AND TEACHINGS OF JESUS 89 


struggle is freedom to prey upon, to despoil, and to work 
havoc upon the delicate and complex fabric of the social 
organism, ‘True social freedom is freedom to contribute 
one’s bit to the social weal, the humane wealth, by work 
that expresses one’s own best impulses. Genuine and last- 
ing happiness can come only from doing something so- 
cially worth while, because one is able to make his best 
contribution to social well-being by doing just that thing. 
The exploiter of his fellows and the social parasite are 
not truly happy. 

Such I conceive to be the social philosophy of Jesus. 
His gospel is a social ethics reposing upon a religious 
faith. It is a social philosophy grounded in the character 
of the Supreme Reality. The entire framework and sub- 
stance of His ethics is social. It all centers in, and issues 
forth from, the concept of the Kingdom of God. What- 
ever be one’s solution of the riddle in regard to the rela- 
tion between the immanent and the catastrophic or tran- 
scendent aspects of the concept of the Kingdom, this much 
is certain—for Jesus, the Kingdom is identical with a 
new and more humane social order, in which human per- 
sonality shall be lived in free, loving and happy fellowship 
with man and God. 

He repudiated all temptations and inducements to en- 
tangle the Kingdom with the affairs of Judean priest- 
eraft or Roman statecraft. His religion is a laymen’s 
religion, His ethics is not the ethics of lawyers, politi- 
cians and financiers. He rejected all seductions to make 
terms and strike treaties with the existing orders, This 
is not, as sometimes asserted, because Jesus was indiffer- 
ent to man’s economic or cultural welfare. It was not 
that He despised civilization or culture. It was because 


90 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


His Kingdom had nothing in common with the statecraft 
or priestcraft of His day. The priestcraft was spiritually 
and humanely empty of life. The statecraft was rotten. 
“Render unto Cesar the things that are Cesar’s” is not 
an endorsement of Cesar, but a refusal to be entangled 
with Cesarism. ‘Who made me a judge or a divider 
over you?” is not an endorsement of the Hebrew law of 
inheritance. The heart of the social gospel is pithily 
expressed in the words, ‘Among the Gentiles they who 
exercise lordship over them are accounted great; but it 
shall not be so among you; whosoever would be great 
among you let him be servant of all. For the Son of 
Man came not to be ministered unto but to minister.” 
The greatest in the Kingdom are they who serve most 
faithfully—they who visit the sick and the needy, clothe 
the naked, feed the hungry, comfort them that mourn. 
Lip service is worthless. ‘‘Not every one that saith unto 
me, Lord, Lord, but he that doeth the will of my Father 
which is in heaven’ shall enter in. The Kingdom is 
ruled by the motives of fellowship, codperation and min- 
istration. The services rendered are to be determined 
by the needs found. The individuality of every sincere 
soul is held in honor. The humble and loving publican 
and the repentant harlot are welcome. The respectable 
and socially prominent Scribes and Pharisees automati- 
cally exclude themselves by their self-satisfied pride and 
hardness of heart. 

All rites, institutions and laws, even the ceremonial 
and the moral law, are treated as instruments or means 
for furthering human welfare and happiness, not as ends 
in themselves to which humanity must be fitted at any 
cost. Nothing is sacred but the human person, the spirit 





SOCIAL ETHICS AND TEACHINGS OF JESUS 91 


or soul in man. In the Kingdom there is no place for 
hatred, anger, envy, fear or selfish aggrandizement. 

God is the Loving Father of all souls. He rules by 
affection in the affections of His children. The children 
of the Kingdom are to grow continually towards perfec- 
tion, by their life of free fellowship and service. Thus 
they become perfect in the likeness of their Heavenly 
Father. For he that hath seen mercy and justice, he that 
hath experienced comradeship and fellowship, he that 
hath looked into the face of a fellow man with love and 
justice, hath seen the Father. 

This is the most revolutionary social doctrine that has 
ever been presented to men. It has been realized time 
and again among voluntary groups—among those who 
have been touched and purified by love of their fellows 
and enkindled by the vision of the Kingdom. Wherever 
there is genuine comradeship and fellowship, service and 
fealty, there is the Kingdom. It can take root and grow 
in the most untoward places. 

But it has never yet been made the ideal of a politically 
or industrially organized society as a whole. There are 
not, and there never have been, Christian nations, or 
Christian systems of industry and commerce. The near- 
est approach to a Christian system was in the Catholic 
world of the Middle Ages. Our present Christendom is 
about as far away from Christ’s ideal as was the ancient 
Roman Empire, amidst the ruins of which the Church 
grew up. And yet the Kingdom of Christ presents the 
only hope for our present distraught and confused world. 
The mechanical and pagan paradises of H. G. Wells and 
others, who place their hopes on mere intellect and in- 
genuity of organization, will not make over humankind. 


92 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


Unless civilization is to become a smoking ruin it must 
be made over in the image of the Kingdom. All other 
schemes of human association have failed miserably— 
monarchies, aristocracies and caste systems. Competitive 
and capitalistic plutocracy, the system we have been liv- 
ing under, is already in the throes of dissolution. An 
acquisitive industrialism; geared up to produce simply 
more cheap and ugly things for profit and sensuous grati- 
fication, indifferent to man’s creative impulses and the 
craving for comradeship, beauty and joy in life, is on 
' the rocks. | 

The only faith worth cleaving to is faith in the values 
of the Kingdom. Unless men can have a reasonable 
chance to realize a better social order, one to which they 
can with joy dedicate their constructive energies, then 
mankind is without courage and without hope, since with- 
out any worthy and inspiring objectives. 

All our traditional political and economic devices are 
on trial to-day. And no new political or economic devices 
will work better unless they can give good promise of 
affirmative answers to the following questions: Do they 
give play to the native human impulses for creative work, 
for the expression of individuality, for comradeship, for 
beauty and self-expression ¢ 

The incessant drive towards mere quantity production 
for profit, the continued hypertrophy of the acquisitive im- 
pulse and the atrophy of other human impulses will only 
breed more discontent and disorder. Social peace will 
come only when the workers can feel in their hearts and 
see with their mental eyes that their work is worth while 
in enriching the lives of their fellows as well as their own. 
We must be able to feel and see that our work is con- 





SOCIAL ETHICS AND TEACHINGS OF JESUS 93 


tributing to the deeper and more lasting values of human 
life—to the life of the soul—to joy and wealth and free- 
dom and harmony of spirit. Turn man into a machine 
and a server of machines and he is damned and society is 
damned with him. 

The one worthy object of faith and service to which 
a reasonable human being can dedicate himself to-day 1s 
the Kingdom of God, the ‘Beloved Community’ as Royce 
so happily put it, realizing itself here and now in the 
common lives of men and women. Duty, the voice of 
God, “by which the most ancient heavens are fresh and 
strong,” is the love for the ideal of the beloved community, 
perfecting itself without ceasing, in the fellowship of 
human persons. ‘The life is more than meat and the 
body than raiment.”” To-day men are asking, sternly and 
insistently, of a sick civilization, of a mechanized and 
acquisitive society, What shall a man give in exchange 
for his soul, for his individuality? The only satisfying 
answer is, A fuller and richer communal life, in which 
the human soul can expand and find fulfillment and joy 
in a harmonious human fellowship of service and achieve- 
ment. A life in which duty and love, self-sacrifice and 
self-fulfillment are made one in the sharing of our achieve- 
ments and joys, in codperation in the common work for 
the fuller possession of beauty and truth, of intelligent 
freedom and spiritual communion with man and nature, 
and through man and nature with God. Here is Imman- 
uel—God with us. Here, in the communal life realizing 
in comradeship the humane values of living is the King- 
dom of God. Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom is at one with 
the ideal community of the new social ethics. 


Notse.—The social philosophy of Jesus differs radically from 


94 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


all forms of state socialism, from Plato down to the guild social- 
ists. His premises are different, and therefore the social applica- 
tions of his teachings are different. The Kingdom is a free or 
voluntary fellowship of individuals who labor for service, rather 
than for personal profits. They are motivated by the joy of 
self-expression in service. They care nothing for economic 
wealth or power in themselves, since they regard these goods 
only as instruments for furthering the physical, mental and 
spiritual welfare of persons. In a broad sense, Jesus may be 
regarded as teaching a voluntary socialism or communism, since 
his disciples would labor to support themselves in the simplest 
manner; to express their own moral individualities and to serve 
their fellows through free and glad codperation and ministration. 

The motives and principles of most forms of socialism stand 
in sharp contrast to the teachings of Jesus. The class struggle, 
the dictatorship of the organized proletariat, the reduction of all 
social motives to materialistic ends, the use of force to compel 
men to serve their fellows—to all such notions, Jesus’ ethics is 
not only foreign but hostile. 

It has often been said that Jesus was an individualist. It has 
also often been said that he was a socialist. In one sense he 
was neither, and in another sense he was both. He was neither 
a political, nor economic individualist nor socialist. He had no 
direct concern with the changing fashions of economic and polit- 
ical practices in “this world.” He sedulously avoided laying 
down rules or laws, for the conduct of business or statecraft. 
He was a liberator of the spirit. He enunciated basal principles, 
he opened up wider visions of human possibilities, he aroused 
into full play higher motives. 

Ethically and spiritually Jesus is both an individualist and a 
socialist. He is an individualist in that he appeals to the spirit 
-——to the heart, the conscience and the will; and only individuals 
feel, think and will. He stresses the supreme value of the indi- 
vidual soul; and only individuals have souls, and are centers of 
value. Nothing counts for anything at all in comparison with 
the right inward attitude of harmony, integrity, purity of motive 
and good will. He is a socialist or communist, inasmuch as, 
for Him, the right attitude on the part of the individual is im- 
possible unless the individual finds joy in forgiveness, service, 
cooperation, fellowship. Moreover, Jesus teaches clearly that 
there can be no spiritually healthy and full life for an individual 





= 
——— oe LS 


SOCIAL ETHICS AND TEACHINGS OF JESUS 95 


unless his feelings and thoughts are suffused, and his will con- 
trolled by right social motives. For Jesus individual personality 
and social fellowship and codperation are the two poles of the 
same life. The abundant life is personal because social and 
social because personal. 

Jesus never taught that all who labor should have an equal 
economic reward. He laid down no rules on this matter. But 
clearly he saw that the millennium would not come simply by 
trying to force men, through the police power of the state, to 
be conscientious and to do their work in the spirit of cooperation 
and service. He saw that the thing of first importance is the 
right inward attitude—the right temper of mind. It has been 
said, truly, that in order that a system of organized economic 
and political socialism might work well it would be necessary 
that the members of the state should be animated by Christian 
motives, and that if they were so animated, no system of com- 
pulsory political regimentation would be necessary. This is quite 
true. 

Every attempt at a comprehensively organized and compelling 
system of state socialism will suffer shipwreck on the rocks of 
human greed, laziness, stupidity, mental inertia, and moral self- 
ishness and shortsightedness. Even without the compelling in- 
fluence of greed, which might be mitigated by reducing the 
chances for any big prizes under a socialistic régime, human 
stupidity, mental inertia and laziness would in themselves suffice 
to wreck a socialistic state. On the whole, the state’s business 
is badly conducted because the citizens have not yet sufficient 
interest and intelligence to see to it that it is better conducted. 
The successful extension of state activity is predicated upon a 
much more socially-minded and alert moral intelligence and 
dynamic than we now have. 

Jesus does not ignore the necessity of economic sustenance. 
But he emphasizes the supreme import of the right attitude of 
mind. “Ye must be born again.” We must get a right convie- 
tion as to the values and motives of living in order to do our bit. 
The social ethics of Jesus stands or falls by the validity of the 
principle that more social justice, peace and human welfare are 
attainable only through the voluntary cooperation of intelligently 
free and responsible human individuals, and that this voluntary 
cooperation can be insured only by that change of mind 

(metanoia) which is called the new birth, and which means the 


96 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


reorientation of the soul’s values and motives by the principles 
of the Kingdom. 

The only sure means for the accomplishment of this end is 
by a more socialized education—ethical and spiritual. By mak- 
ing mere clever manipulators and technicians we may only be 
letting more dangerous devils loose in the world. We have 
divorced intellectual education and moral or social education, 
not because we have not taught formal religion but because we 
have not infused our education sufficiently with the social spirit 
and viewpoint. We have failed to put into vigorous effect, as a 
reasoned conviction and motivating force, the great principle 
that there is no real and lasting value except personality, and 
that personality is realized and lived out only in fellowship. 

A Christian social democracy would be one whose members 
were animated and guided by Christ’s principles of fair play, 
cooperation, service and fellowship. ‘The members of such a 
democracy would be much more zealous in the discharge of their 
duties than in exercising their rights. They would aim to do 
their work as well as possible, whatever it was. For they would 
know that, however humble the work, it was their social service 
—at once the expression of their own personality and their 
necessary and valuable contribution to the upkeep of the com- 
munity of personalities. 








CHAPTER IX 
NIETZSCHE AND JESUS 


Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most significant lit- 
erary and social phenomena of recent times. During the 
great war the purport of his work was travestied and mis- 
interpreted by American newspaper and pulpit oracles in 
a manner that revealed the shallowness and ignorance of 
our popular “culture.” Nietzsche was neither a panegyr- 
ist of Prussian Kultur nor an apostle of German Schreck- 
lichkevt.* In fact, he called himself a good European and 
was one of the severest critics of the social tendencies of 
pre-war Germany. The gross misunderstanding of his 
teachings was no doubt due to the hasty and prosaic liter- 
alism with which our oracles read the writings (though 
I doubt if they read much in him) of one who was essen- 
tially a great prose poet. Nietzsche was master of a won- 
derfully vivid, colorful and scintillating style. His lead- 
ing thoughts were put forth in striking aphorisms. He 
was not a systematic or logically coherent thinker. He 
has had very little influence on technically trained phil- 
osophers, but a very wide influence on young persons of 
literary and artistic temperaments. He is one of the very 
greatest of German writers. 


1I know only one good exposition of Nietzsche’s philosophy in 
English. It is by W. M. Salter. The best criticism, from a Christian 
standpoint, is that by the late Dr. J. N. Figgis: The Will to Power. 


97 


98 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


Nietzsche is significant in two respects: (1) As a 
mordant and merciless critic of the spiritual and esthetic 
defects of modern industrialism and democracy. (2) As 
the protagonist of an esthetic individualism, a social 
aristocracy based on distinctions of mind and character. 
Incidental to the promulgation of his individualistic gos- 
pel is Nietzsche’s polemic against Christianity. 

Nietzsche directs all the powerful shafts of his irony, 
raillery and invective against one capital defect of con- 
temporary European social life, as he observed it in Ger- 
many and learned of its existence and growth in other 
industrialized nations, This defect lies in the vulgariz- 
ing, mediocritizing and materializing tendencies of our 
industrialized machine civilization given over to quantity 
production. He thinks that Germany and England, the 
most highly industrialized nations of his day, offer the 
most awful examples of the spiritual degeneration which 
results from exalting numbers above quality and trying 
to make, by machinery and the cult of equality, a stand- 
ardized culture. Education, art, letters, every aspect of 
culture, is succumbing to the cult of mediocrity. Fine- 
ness in taste, distinction in manners and character, indi- 
viduality and variety are everywhere succumbing to the 
appetites and standards of the masses. He holds that, 
if civilization keeps on on its present road, soon every 
note of striving for beauty, distinction and spiritual power 
will be drowned out in the clamor of the vulgar multi- 
tude for bread and the circus. Only those goods which 
are valued and consumed by all—material goods—will 
have any recognition. 

Nietzsche hates political democracy, socialism and com- 
munism with a deadly hatred. These movements accel- 





NIETZSCHE AND JESUS 99 


erate the impetus of our industrial civilization towards 
spiritual ruin. The greatest injustice, he says, is equal- 
ity—the claim of all alike to social, economic and mental 
equality. This claim flies in the face of nature and 
history. The masses are, as they have always been, a 
herd of domesticated animals (Herdenmenschen). Mass 
morality is the morality of a herd of slaves who incul- 
cate unlimited self-denial, renunciation, self-sacrifice and 
pity on the few strong individuals in order to keep them 
from ruling and imposing on the herd high and strenuous 
standards of action. This mass morality is the result of 
a gigantic, if unconscious, conspiracy on the part of the 
mass which is weak, lazy and inert, to retard the devel- 
opment of a race of heroes, Fear, envy and mental inertia 
are the motives which have given rise to this mass mor- 
ality. Thus the strong are sacrificed for the weak, the 
healthy in mind and body for the diseased, the heroic and 
strenuous for the lazy and cowardly, the distinguished 
and noble for the idiotic and vulgar. This morality of 
the mass enables the mass to multiply in their weakness, 
inertia and stupidity and, by crowding out the strong, 
vigorous and valiant, to produce a steady racial degen- 
eration. 

In nature the reverse was true, otherwise man would 
never have come into being. In nature the struggle for 
existence enables the strong to survive and increase, 
whereas the weak go to the wall. In human society the 
natural and beneficent process of evolution has been turned 
upside down. ®riginally, “Good” meant noble, powerful, 
able to rule; “‘Virtue” meant strength and vigor of in- 
dividuality. The ruling races, before the advent of Chris- 
tianity in the West and Buddhism in India, were the 


100 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


aristocratic races (the Aryans or nobles, the Aryans of 
India and Persia, the Greeks, the Norsemen, the Celts). 
Nietzsche believes in the inherent superiority of the Nor- 
dic race. By their energy, daring and power they ruled 
the small dark-haired races (such as the Semites and the 
primitive Mediterranean stock). Moved by fear and envy, 
the latter invented a new morality which exalts self-sacri- 
fice, renunciation and pity to the supreme place. The 
Jews, who were always being defeated and buffeted about 
by stronger races, cunningly devised this repressive moral 
system and thus have won a victory at the cost of racial de- 
generation. The European world has been perverted and 
its native vigor undermined by the influence of four Jews 
—Jesus, Peter the fisherman, Paul the Pharisee and 
Mary. Christianity is the greatest enemy of human prog- 
ress, the most baneful instrument of degeneration, that 
has ever been fashioned. It must be destroyed. 
Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Superman, the leader and 
ruler and savior of society, may easily be misunderstood. 
Nietzsche holds that the essence of life is “the will to 
power.” He frequently enjoins his heroes to be strong 
and be hard. But they are to be hardest on themselves. 
The Nietzschean superman is as far as possible from being 
a big, self-indulgent, sensuous brute. It is a race of spir- 
itual heroes that Nietzsche wishes to see mankind produce. 
These can arise only through the affirmation of life. His 
bitter opposition to the doctrine of self-denial and self- 
sacrifice arises from his notion that in Christianity these 
virtues are enjoined for their own sakes. The good life, 
for Nietzsche, is a life of affirmation, of “‘yea-sayings” in 
place of “nay-sayings.” Everything is good which pro- 
motes life, and life is identical with power. Renunciation 





NIETZSCHE AND JESUS 101 


and asceticism are bad because they maim the life in- 
stincts. The instincts which promote life are the in- 
stincts of self-assertion, mastery, leadership. The supreme 
authority is the authority of the genius or hero. (This 
is very like Carlyle’s great man idea.) There is nothing 
good or true in itself. That is good or true which min- 
isters to life and power. 

The superman will be severe with himself. He will 
practice a strenuous self-discipline and self-control, to the 
end that he may attain self-mastery. He will be hard 
on the weaker members of the race—only that he may 
improve the race. Nietzsche does not deny a place to 
pity and sympathy. It is only when these attitudes are 
indiscriminately practiced, so that the result is the per- 
petuation of the incurably vicious and defective, the 
imbecile, the diseased and botched travesties of human- 
kind, that Nietzsche pours out upon pity and sympathy 
the vials of his wrath. The superman will practice 
noblesse oblige. He will rule the masses sternly, but only 
for their own good. That which is most pitiful in human- 
kind is that it should not be led and ruled by the noblest 
spirits—that fineness, mental vigor, courage, distinction 
should be submerged and lost instead of being in the 
vanguard and setting the pace for humanity. Nietzsche 
is the prophet of a high, difficult and strenuous ideal of 
human perfection. He is an optimist and believes that 
mankind may progress towards a richer and more abun- 
dant life, one of greater beauty, power, and distinction of 
individuality, if it will seek to bring forth and obey a 
race of spiritual heroes or demi-gods. 

Nietzsche’s criticisms of our present industrialized 
civilization are pertinent and valid against American 


102 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


civilization even more than against pre-war Germany. 
They should be pondered by all who have at heart the 
production of a finer civilization. Whether these defects 
are necessarily inherent in an industrial democracy is, 1 
think, open to question. I do not personally believe that 
they are. I think they have arisen because we had no 
strong tradition of culture to stem the overwhelming tide 
of commercialism, due to the rapid development of large- 
scale industrialism in the hands of private enterprise, and 
have not yet developed social institutions strong enough 
to control the commercial spirit. The defects of our in- 
dustrial democracy are removable by a more thorough- 
going social control of the industrial process. I do not 
believe that the common people are indifferent to the right 
leadership, or insensible to the value of distinction in 
mind and character. When we have more fully socialized 
industry and turned the proceeds thereof into the develop- 
ment, by education, of a higher average of enlightenment 
and refinement, we shall get a finer culture. Prewar 
Germany was not democratic. It was highly industrial- 
ized. Industrialism is not democratized even now in the 
United States. The chief defects of modern industrialism 
are due to the fact that, without effective social control, 
private greed has been able to get most of its proceeds. 
Certainly there can be no great culture without the recog- 
nition of a considerable range of distinction in values. 
A genuine culture must have an aristocratic element. An 
intelligent social democracy will not fail to see this. When 
the captains of industry and the lords of high finance 
are dethroned from the positions of chief rulers, then 
once more democracy may follow intellectual and spiritual 
leaders. 





NIETZSCHE AND JESUS 103 


In any case Nietzsche offers us no way out of the evils 
of mechanized industrialism. He fails to tell us specif- 
ically how a race of spiritual heroes is to be produced 
and to get the leadership in our industrialized society. 
As a critic he is strong and bracing. He wakes us out 
of our complacent optimism with a very cold shower. 
But he offers us no constructive program. He fails utterly 
to see that economic socialization is the one way open to 
a finer and more widespread spiritual individualism. 

Nietzsche went woefully astray in his criticism of Jesus 
and Christianity. I do not find anywhere in the Master’s 
teaching the assertion that all human beings are equal 
either in intelligence or character. Jesus was no ascetic, 
no denier of life. He was the true yea-sayer. He came 
that men might have a more abundant life. He insisted 
that the spiritual life is a paramount to all else—to all 
institutions and observances and material goods. He 
taught renunciation and self-denial only for the sake of 
the more abundant and harmonious spiritual life. He 
taught spiritual freedom and self-mastery. His ideal is 
high, and difficult for those who wish to compromise with 
the unspiritual powers. He never glorified spiritual medi- 
ocrity. He condemned smug self-satisfaction as the worst 
of sinful attitudes. He came to arouse men to spiritual 
heroism. In all these points His ideal is superior to that 
of Nietzsche. When we note the points of conflict between 
the two the superiority of Jesus’ ideal is even more strik- 
ing. For Jesus the way to fineness, to distinction, to 
wholeness of life is the way of humility and service— 
of humility in place of hard aristocratic pride and self- 
assertion; of service in the sense of dedication of one’s 
life to the highest in man. By this service is true indi- 


104 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


viduality and power and life realized. The Christian 
superman does not choose himself and he does not rely 
on his own strength. He is chosen by God and he relies 
on a strength far surpassing his own. Nietzsche’s super- 
man ideal is hard, self-assertive, subjectivistic, without 
other standard than man’s unregenerate thirst for power. 
In it there is no clear basis for a distinction between the 
sensuous and the spiritual. The richness of a life ef 
this sort is the richness of the egotist’s poverty of soul. 
No man, said Lincoln in the spirit of Christ, is fit to be 
another’s master. Only that love which engenders sym- 
pathy, forgiveness, fellowship can make a man fit to care 
for or to lead others. The superman of Nietzsche is a 
creature of passing moods and fancies, relying solely on 
his own unaided power. The Christian superman is 
rooted and grounded on a faith in the supremacy of the 
Spirit of Love in the universe. 

In sum, Nietzsche is bracing as a critic but makes no 
positive contribution to social ideals. His superman is, 
with all his aspiration after fineness, distinction and no- 
bility, an unlovely figure; vague, elusive and inconsistent, 
ruled by pride and yet severe with himself. 

Christ’s ideal is much more exalted. ‘The disciple will 
never be satisfied with himself. The mainspring of his 
striving is not pride. It is the ever-present sense of the 
gap which separates his actual self from the attainment 
of that Godlike perfection which is realized in the measure 
in which the disciple serves and loves the best. Whereas 
in Nietzsche there is no standard of the best, but the 
strong man’s instinctive lust for power and leadership, 
in Christ there is an absolute standard of the best. This 
is the life of service and worshipful love, of spiritual 





| 


ee ee ee ee 


NIETZSCHE AND JESUS 105 


integrity, of truth and fellowship, in bringing to fulfill- 
ment the spiritual community of free and noble person- 
alities. This community is not an abstract ideal. It has 
its source, its sustenance and its fruition in God, the 
Perfect Spirit of the community. Christ’s ideal is high 
and difficult but not vague or shadowy, personal but not 
egotistical or subjective, social but not visionary. It in- 
cludes all that has moral worth in the aristocratic ideal, 
but this is purged of all pride and hardness of heart. 
The only legitimate Christian aristocracy is one of ser- 
vice. The only legitimate Christian individualism is one 
in which the individual develops his powers to the full 
so that he may the better serve the community. 


CHAPTER X 
THE HEART OF JESUS RELIGION 


The Epistles of St. Paul are the earliest extant docu- 
ments of Christian literature. At least seven of them— 
I and II Thessalonians, I and II Corinthians, Galatians, 
Ephesians and Romans—are his writings. These are quite 
sufficient for our purpose, which is to determine what 
Christ’s religion essentially meant to its first great apostle 
and literary exponent. They must all have been written 
between about A.D. 47 and 60. Paul has been called 
the second founder of Christianity; this title is not mis- 
leading, unless it be implied that he founded a different 
religion from that of Jesus Christ Himself. 

Paul makes no mention of the virgin birth of Jesus, 
of His miraculous works nor of the details of His life. 
Paul did not seek to know Christ after the flesh. For 
him, the witness of the Spirit is enough. ‘‘The Spirit 
Himself beareth witness with our spirits that we are the 
children of God.” ‘And because ye are sons, God sent 
forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, 
Father’ (Gal., iv: 6). This does not imply that Paul 
was ignorant of the teachings and deeds of Jesus. Paul 
wrote to adherents to whom the record of the Master’s 
life was a living tradition, doubtless supplemented by 
those written records which became the basis of the Gos- 

106 





THE HEART OF JESUS’ RELIGION 107 


pels, especially the Marcan story and “Q” which contained 
the logza not found in Mark’s Gospel. 

Paul sets the “mind of the Spirit” in sharp opposition 
to the ‘mind of the flesh,” the works and fruits of the 
Spirit in sharp opposition to the works and fruits of the 
flesh (see Romans viii; I Cor. 11: 10-16, xii: 1-3, and 
many other passages). This opposition between the spir- 
itual or rational and ethical life and the merely natural 
or vital life, which also pervades the Johannine gospel, 
is no new thing. It is found in Plato, is a striking feature 
of Neo-Platonism and occurs in the most extreme form 
in various sects and movements, such as Manichaeism, 
Essenism and Gnosticism. Doubtless, Paul imbibed this 
philosophy in his native Tarsus from the Stoics. Paul 
shows markedly the influence of Stoic teaching. And 
Stoicism, as an ethico-religious movement, borrowed and 
popularized Neo-Platonic philosophy. But the sobriety 
of Paul’s mind saved him from the ascetic extravagances 
which the feeling of the warfare of flesh and spirit led 
to in other hands, within as well as without the Church. 
Asceticism is not native to the Hebrew mind. 

The two great events in the earthly life of Christ, on 
which Paul concentrates his thought, are: That Christ 
voluntarily died an ignominious death on the cross to 
redeem men from sin by a consummate act of love; and 
the Resurrection, which is the seal of God’s approval of 
the great deed. The risen life of Christ, of which Paul 
believed himself to have received a luminous demonstra- 
tion, proclaims Christ as the Son of God, the Divine 
Logos or preéxistent Heavenly Man, sent by the Wather 
to redeem men from the bondage of sin and death. The 
fruits of the death and rising again are embraced by men 


108 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


through grateful and loyal love. Faith and courage to 
endure are the offspring of love. The two great fruits of 
Christ’s work are: (1) spiritual liberty, which consists in 
freedom from the bondage of the law (the code of social 
prohibitions) which man by his own unaided power could 
never fully obey; and (2) the power, through love and 
faith in Christ, to put on the mind of Christ and thus 
to be endowed with a positive motive and dynamic which 
will control and direct and elevate the natural impulses 
(the mind of the flesh) as no law could. 

But spiritual liberty is a negative and dependent con- 
sequence of a rich and affirmative Life—the Life in the 
Christian community, the fellowship of the faithful— 
which flows from the grateful and loyal embracement of 
Christ’s love as the supreme motive and ground of faith 
and conduct. The very heart of Christ’s gospel, as Paul 
understands and lives it, 1s expressed in the great hymn 
to Love (I Cor. 13). The essence of Christ, and there- 
fore the essence of God, is Love. The essence of the 
spiritual mind in man is to embrace and practice this 
love, in faith and loyalty. The earthly life and death and 
the risen life of Christ. are the three great acts in the 
consummation of the drama of Divine Love. When, in 
grateful faith and will, man makes this the animating 
motive of his life he puts on Christ, he dwells in Christ 
and Christ in him. Therefore, he dwells in God and 
God in him. 

Paul is an ethical and social mystic. The basic prin- 
ciples of his philosophy and faith (or philosophical faith, 
since it is a doctrine founded on his own spiritual experi- 
ence, as indeed all great theologies and philosophies must 
be) are essentially the same as those of ethical and social 


THE HEART OF JESUS’ RELIGION 109 


idealism or mysticism. I say advisedly “ethical and so- 
cial”; for I do not admit that any doctrine can be called 
“ethical” which is not a doctrine of right social relation- 
ships. A purely egoistic or hedonistic ethics is the nega- 
tion of all ethics, and, I add, it is self-defeating since it 
is the negation of true selfhood or personality. Paul’s 
mysticism is ethical and social. This separates it from 
all sensualistic and individualistic forms of mysticism. 

As Paul conceives the matter, the believer and lover is, 
spiritually, a member of Christ; and Christ is, spiritually, 
in him, But the believer is not in Christ and Christ is 
not in him, as an insulated ego. The faithful, as members 
of the body of Christ, are members one of another. The 
Spirit of Christ, which is the Spirit of God, is the sancti- 
fying, life-giving, sustaining and unifying bond of the 
entire community of the faithful. The individual is truly 
a spirit or person only as a member of the community. 
God is the eternal Ground and Life of the community. 
Christ is the manifestation and, therefore, in this space- 
time world, the inciting spiritual cause of the spiritual 
community. 

The concrete ethical teaching of Paul, when one con- 
siders its brevity and the occasional character of his writ- 
ings, is the richest and noblest, after his Master’s, to be 
found. It has a spiritual elevation and dynamic not 
found in Aristotle, a concrete humaneness and tenderness 
and warmth not found in Epictetus or even in Plato. 
And nothing evidences more clearly the sanity and sobriety 
of this mystic than the sound practical admonitions he 
gives, while living in daily expectation of the Parusva. 

Closely akin to Paul’s thought is the thought of the 
Johannine writings (I refer only to the gospel and the 


110 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


first epistle). This gospel clearly has not the reportorial 
verisimilitude of the other three. Probably some of the 
incidents recorded in this gospel alone are authentic and 
based on an independent tradition. Doubtless, too, some 
of the sayings of Jesus recorded here alone have genuine 
kernels. But the long discourses attributed to Our Lord, 
for example the discourse at the Last Supper, can scarcely 
have been pronounced by Him, as reported. or, in the 
three synoptists, Jesus speaks “winged words,” in aphor- 
istic compact sayings, marvelously concrete and yet home 
thrusting and universal in application. And, of course, 
the discrepancies between the order of events in John and 
the synoptists are glaring. 

The supreme significance of the Johannine gospel con- 
sists in this: It carries out somewhat further the interpre- 
tation of the meaning of Christ’s work that Paul began. 
John (I use the name as familiar, without discussing the 
troublesome and insoluble question who the writer really 
was, for we know from the writing who he really was 
as a sprit or soul) is deeply impregnated with the same 
mystical philosophy as Paul. He is also more of a poet. 
Like Paul, he makes use of the Logos doctrine. Christ 
is the Son of God, the perfect embodiment in human 
form of the Divine Creative Thought, Reason or Word, 
through which God created and sustains the world, reveals 
Himself to men step by step and finally consummates His 
revelation in the redemptive work of the Saviour. In 
Neo-Platonism, Stoicism and Philo, the Logos doctrine 
was the foundation of a religious metaphysics. I have 
not space to sketch all its variant forms here. In sum, 
the Logos is the Divine Reason; immanent in the creation 
and conservation of the world and holding in its thought 





THE HEART OF JESUS’ RELIGION 111 


the various types or patterns of finite being (the Ideas 
of Plato); revealing itself in wise men and good. The 
Logos is the self-manifesting Mind of God and, therefore, 
the connecting link between the world, and the Transcend- 
ent and Ineffable Mystery of the Godhead. What St. 
Paul and St. John do is to give to the Logos a more per- 
sonal, concrete and ethical character; by identifying the 
work and person of Christ with the Logos, In terms of 
the profoundest and most spiritual philosophy of their 
day they interpreted, for thoughtful believers, the Supreme 
Spiritual Value which the person and work of Jesus had 
for all who had been deeply moved by that noblest and 
fairest of all lives among the sons of men. It is true, 
that, in this process of interpretation, the warm and firm 
human lineaments of Jesus grow somewhat dim. Not 
far away looms the danger of dehumanization by Greek 
scholastics. It is true that we cannot to-day think in their 
terms. But we should recognize that, for their time, Paul 
and John did give an interpretation of the ethical and 
spiritual meaning of that Transcendent Human Life which 
led thinking men to be touched by the essential spirit of 
Jesus of Nazareth. The Logos doctrine, in their hands, 
is not a metaphysics of nature. It is an instrument for 
spreading the good tidings of self-spending and redeeming 
Love as the Supreme Value for man as a person and a 
member of the community. If we take it aright, it leads 
us straight back to the human Jesus of the synoptists. 
In the synoptics we find a concrete human individual, 
a living person, reported by friends who do not under- 
stand Him fully and, therefore, doubtless, misquote Him. 
In view of this and the fallibility of memory and the 
fragmentariness of the record, what a unique and clear im- 


112 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


pression does the candid reader get of an absolutely self- 
consistent, strong and clear personality? He is essentially 
a great creative figure in the religious realm. Many single 
sayings of Jesus can be paralleled, but the total and in- 
tegral impression is without parallel. His teachings, His 
deeds, His career, form one harmonious whole. ‘The 
burden of proof rests on those who would reduce this 
figure to a myth. There is no less reason, nay more, for 
the historicity of Jesus than there is for the historicity 
of Socrates. The discrepancies between Xenophon 
and Plato in regard to Socrates are greater than the 
discrepancies of the gospels in regard to Jesus. Those 
who would trace the genesis of the history of Jesus 
to the culis of the dying and rising god, which were 
widespread in Asia Minor, put the cart before the horse. 
Such cults may have colored the interpretation of the 
person of Jesus, but, without the kernel supplied by a 
historical personality, it would have required a creative 
personality of the same order to have invented the history 
of Jesus. Sects of obscure and ordinary individuals do 
not invent such definite and heroic figures. 

What, then, was the heart of Jesus’ life and work? 
What was the heart of His gospel? Jor what did He 
really live and die? Was it something essentially dif- 
ferent from Paul’s and John’s doctrines? I think not. 
The heart of Jesus’ religion is very simple and very revolu- 
tionary. Let us remember that religion is whatsoever 
binds the soul of man, in communion, in worship and 
devotion, to the Highest Value, and Supremest Good, the 
Most Satisfying End, in the whole universe. 

Jesus teaches that all material and economic goods, and 





THE HEART OF JESUS’ RELIGION 113 


all social institutions and ordinances, must be made sub- 
servient to the inward life, to the life of feeling, thought 
and volition. The goal of living is a more abundant and 
harmonious soul-lfe. Men are not to be unduly con- 
cerned about the material conditions of living. They are 
not to labor primarily for the meat that perisheth. They 
are to trust God, who is the creator and sustainer of the 
natural order. In Jesus’ thinking, there is no vestige of 
the dualism between God and Nature which, as a soul- 
sickness, has infected so much of human thought. Jesus 
is entirely at home with nature. He finds the Father’s 
activity and care revealed in the common events of the 
natural order—in the lives of trees and grasses, of flowers 
and birds. Jesus teaches, by implication, the modern 
doctrine of the continuous immanental energizing of God 
in nature and in humanity. 

The true soul-life is attained through honesty, simplic- 
ity, wholeness or purity, humility and courage. Men are 
to be self-respecting. Therefore, they must be spiritually 
free. But these spiritual qualities can be developed only 
by forgetting self and spending oneself in the service of 
social and impersonal ends. Men become great of soul 
in proportion as they love and serve needy fellows and 
worthy causes. Love, loyalty, self-forgetting courage— 
these are the three great words in the moral vocabulary 
of the Christian, The disciples will spend themselves 
prodigally and fearlessly. They will not resist evil with 
evil, but overcome it with positive good. For evil is 
negative, cowardly and selfish. It kills the soul which 
breathes it. So with envy, hatred, the spirit of revenge. 
These are forms of self-assertion that destroy the true 


114 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


self. The spiritual self grows and flourishes only on that 
which is affirmative, constructive, that which makes for 
harmony and comprehensiveness and creativeness. 

And why should men live thus? What is the final 
motive and ground? In order that they become Godlike. 
“Ye, therefore, shall be perfect as your Heavenly Father 
is perfect.” They are to do these things, live this life 
that they may be the children of their Father, which is 
in Heaven. 

Other religions and other philosophies have conceived 
the secret of the universe to he in Inconceivable Power 
and Ineffable Majesty, or in Inscrutable Mystery, or 
Awful Holiness, or Pure and Passionless Thought. For 
Jesus the secret of the universe, the Supreme Value and 
Meaning of existence, is revealed in such simple facts as 
that the sun shines and the rain descends on the fields 
of the just and the unjust; as that those who wander in 
life’s mazes lost until the eleventh hour may discover the 
prize of the meaning of life as truly as those who march 
forward without grievous error from early morn until 
dewy eve; as that the careful, prudent, selfish man who 
buries his talent in a napkin, on the principle, “safety 
first,” loses it, while the one who risks all he has gains 
more. 

The central principle of Jesus’ teaching, concerning 
God and the true values of human life, runs counter to 
all “worldly” principles of contract, bargain and sale, 
justice, laws and politics. For all these things are but 
variations on the one theme: “An eye for an eye and a 
tooth for a tooth.” The principle of all worldly business 
is the equal exchange of measurable commodities. The 
standard of value is always a materially determinable 


THE HEART OF JESUS’ RELIGION 115 


quantitative unit. The ruling motive is acquisition, sup- 
plemented by compensation for loss and by the infliction of 
equal loss when compensation is unobtainable. The 
“worldly” self preserves itself by acquisition and con- 
servation of its acquisitions. 

Jesus’ central conception of value flatly outrages all 
these principles. God is Creative, Self-imparting, Self- 
spending Love. The very essence of Divine Perfection 
consists in eternally creating, sustaining and revealing 
Himself in the Imperfect. God’s Infinitude is not to live 
an isolated and transcendent life; it is to live in and 
through the finite. The endless richness of His Being 
outpours and fills up the poverty of our beings. The only 
spiritual poverty and weakness is that of the man who, 
in fear and therefore in distrust and stupid selfishness, 
shuts himself off from the abundance and greatness of 
God that pulsates through nature and humanity. 

From the standpoint of Christ the problem of moral 
evil is a social problem. All the rank injustices of this 
world, all the undeserved suffering of the good, all the 
unmerited prosperity of the self-seekers, all hindrances to 
the flourishing of the life of joy and peace and fellowship, 
in widest commonalty spread, are due to the fear and 
cupidity that spring from a false notion of selfhood and 
of the true meaning and value of life. True goodness, 
the abundant life which is joy giving, is found only in 
the love which casts out all fear; the love that spends 
self and wins the peace of God; the love that empties self 
and is filled with the riches of humanity and all spiritual 
possessions; the love that “‘beareth all things, believeth 
all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” 
Through the self-spending love that dares and hopes and 


116 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF, TO-DAY 


endures are men redeemed into Godlikeness. For he that 
seeketh to preserve his powers and possessions intact shall 
lose them, and he that spendeth them boldly and without 
stint shall gain fullness of life in union with his fellows 
and with God. For Christ, the one great sin is selfishness, 
which is another name for moral cowardice, for lack of 
spiritual daring. No man is afraid, until he puts himself 
in the center of his thoughts and pictures himself as he 
sees himself there sustaining some hurt or loss. All good 
work is self-forgetting and done without thought of pay. 
Christ’s spiritual order is aptly expressed in Kipling’s 
words: 

Then no one shall work for money, 

And no one shall work for fame; 

But, each for the joy of the working, 

And each in his separate star, 


Shall paint the thing as he sees it, 
For the God of things as they are. 


The root of all evil is to turn one’s back on the great 
adventure of living and to shut oneself up in the dark, 
musty, fungus-overgrown chamber of one’s miserable ego. 

It takes a bold and loving spirit to affirm the Christ 
faith to-day in the face of the advancing tide of theoretical 
materialism and the vastly more threatening tide of prac- 
tical materialism and cowardly selfishness which seems 
to have gained the upper hand in business and politics, 
especially in our international outlook. As a nation we 
have turned our backs on all high daring and generous 
endeavor. Nevertheless, amidst these “gloomy and o’er- 
darkened days” is not Christ the one “shape of beauty” 
that “moves away the pall”? Is not His religion the one 
philosophy that strikes boldly at the root of all evil—the 


THE HEART OF JESUS’ RELIGION 117 


three-headed dragon of fear, cowardice and the self-seek- 
ing which is spiritual suicide? Does not the long roll 
of loving and fearless spirits in all ages, who have tri- 
umphed in His sign, bear witness to the spiritual truth 
of His bold and paradoxical doctrine of God and of the 
true values of life ? 


CHAPTER XI 
RELIGION AND MORALS 


A code, or system of morals, consists of the rules, or 
principles of action that are regarded in a human society, 
a community, as the essential conditions for the realiza- 
tion of the good life by its members. In short, morality 
consists of those principles of human conduct, obedience 
to which establishes and maintains a satisfactory life. 
If it were possible for a human being to grow up and 
live wholly solitary, morals would have no meaning for 
him. ‘This is not possible. A human individual grows 
to his full intellectual and spiritual stature only as a 
member of various communities: first, in the family; then 
in the neighborhood, the school, the civic community and 
the nation; finally in a consciousness of his membership 
in the human race and the cosmos. In these various social 
relationships, the individual’s life is both widened in the 
scope of his thought and interests, and deepened in its 
meanings. As he enters into wider relationships, these 
react on his conception of the meanings of the narrower 
and more intense and familiar relationships. The moral 
value of the family is altered when it is viewed in the 
light of the community, the nation, humanity and the 
cosmos. The moral significance of the national life is 
changed when it is viewed as an element in the life of 
humanity, and the life of humanity when this is viewed 

118 


RELIGION AND MORALS 119 


in its cosmic relationships. And, in entering into, and 
living in all these relationships, the individual is under- 
going a spiritual transformation. He is being fashioned 
into a personality, or spiritual individual. 

One who regards himself in isolation as the be-all and 
end-all of his purposive action is a moral monster, or, 
perhaps one should say, a moral imbecile. One who re- 
gards the family as the be-all and end-all has a very 
meager morality. He is immoral with regard to the 
larger relationships. And the man for whom the nation 
is the ultimate limit of moral endeavor has not reached 
the highest level of moral insight. The problem of mor- 
ality is to determine the right balance between the claims 
of the various social circles of which the individual is 
a member—from the family to humanity and the cosmos. 
For, be it said, the individual has not attained the highest 
level of moral insight who stops short of the cosmical 
relationships of mankind and of all its constituent social 
groups. It is the human race as a constituent in the 
life of the universe, or cosmos, that is the final subject 
of moral thought and action. ‘We cannot acquire ripe 
wisdom and genuine well-being and happiness if we ignore 
our relations to nature, and to the ultimate common 
ground of nature and humanity. 

The more primitive moral systems of mankind consist 
of customs, or social habits, binding on the individual, 
and which are not questioned. Customary moral codes 
are revised and simplified and made more coherent in the 
explicitly formulated Jaws and moral codes of societies. 
As man becomes more reflective, gains wider experience, 
desire and material for thought, he criticizes and revises 
his traditional systems of social customs. Through the 


120 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


insights of great moral teachers, principles and ideals take 
the place of customs, and become the criteria of laws. 
So the highest level of moral development is personal or 
reflective morality—a condition in which there is recog- 
nized the duty and opportunity for the thinking indi- 
vidual to arrive at moral convictions for himself, and to 
determine by thoughtful consideration the applications 
from day to day in changing situations of these moral 
principles. 

At the level of personal morality there is much more 
social freedom and moral initiative for the individual 
than in a custom-bound society. But this does not mean 
that the individual is relieved of the obligation to be 
socially moral. Rather are his obligations greatly in- 
ereased. He no longer satisfies the requirements of the 
good life by obeying the customs. He must continually 
consider his moral obligations and responsibilities, as well 
as his moral rights. The more rights, the more re- 
sponsibility—the more opportunity for the individual 
to grow and live by self-directed effort, the more duties 
he has. 

Ethics is the theory of morality. Ethics arises only 
when men have reached the stage of personal reflection 
upon the principles of social conduct. The aim of ethics 
is to formulate a theory of the moral standards, ends or 
goods which should guide thoughtful human beings in the 
conduct of their social relations. It is not part of ethical 
theory to determine what the individual ought to do under 
changing circumstances, and in ever varying situations, 
It is precisely the prerogative and duty of human beings 
who have the enjoyment of moral freedom and respon- 
sibility to determine the details of moral action for them- 


RELIGION AND MORALS 121 


selves in the light of ends, or standards, which they de- 
liberately embrace. 

It is sometimes said that ethics is concerned with the 
principles, or ends, or standards of judgment for the indi- 
vidual, whereas the determination of the social principles 
of right action belongs to sociology, or social philosophy. 
This is a false antithesis. There is no good or right for 
an individual which has not a social reference, and there 
is no social end which is not an end for the individual. 
For a society or community consists of individuals in 
dynamic relation, acting and reacting, enjoying and suf- 
fering from one another. There is no real distinction 
between ethics and social philosophy. It is all a question 
of emphasis at the starting point. One may begin with 
the individual or with the group, in the consideration of 
moral theory. But whichever one begins with, one must 
end with the other, in order to escape a distorted and 
lopsided theory. There is a distinction between Ethics 
and Sociology. It is often transgressed or ignored. It 
is this: Ethics is the theory of the ends, or values, or 
moral standards of human conduct; whereas Sociology 
is a descriptive science which deals only with the facts 
and factual laws of human society, with the different 
forms of social structure and their evolution, and without 
regard to their moral values. When the sociologist claims 
to set up standards, ends or norms for the organization 
and conduct of society, he has ceased to be a sociologist 
and has become an ethicist. This way lies confusion of 
thought, if the change in attitude from mere factual de- 
scription to ethical valuation is not explicitly recognized. 

What, then, is the relation between religion and morals ? 
They go together. In every principal phase in the de- 


122 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


velopment of human culture the religion of that particular 
culture takes up and affirms the supreme validity of its 
moral codes or moral ideals. Whether we are dealing 
with the culture of a primitive animistic community, or 
of a Christian church, the same principle holds true. 
Whatever is regarded by that society as right, or good, is 
viewed in its religion as having the standing and sanction 
which comes from the approval of the supreme powers in 
the universe. 

It is sometimes said that religion has been a hindrance 
to moral development. Those who say this point to the 
ease of Socrates, or Jesus, or other cases (and there are 
many in the history of man). But the statement betrays 
confusion of thought. The so-called conflict between re- 
ligion and morality is always a conflict between some 
established and customary system of moral conduct and 
religion and a higher, simpler, more coherent, more spir- 
itual moral and religious insight. Every great forward 
step in ethical thought is accompanied by the faith that 
the supreme, cosmical power is on the side of the new 
insight. It was so with the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, 
Socrates, Plato and the Stoics, the early Christian Church, 
the reformers within and without the Catholic Church. 
It will continue to be so. ‘or religious faith is the lifting 
up into the Eternal, into the Supreme and Permanent, 
of these moral values, purposes or ideals that are regarded 
as best. Religion proclaims the supremacy and perma- 
nence of the good life. It affirms that the best triumphs 
and endures, that the highest values are eternally real 
and reign in the cosmos, that the true ends of human 
conduct are securely anchored in the nature of things, 
that all human ideals are eternally real in and for God. 


RELIGION AND MORALS 123 


It is sometimes said that the moral life in man always 
involves a conflict between the zs and the ought to be, 
the actual and the zdeal, the factual and the good. There- 
fore, religion transcends morality. Yes, but religion 
transcends morality only by completing and sustaining 
what the moral life of man aims at. For faith, the good 
that we must realize is already real in God. We can 
overcome the evil since there is One in whom it is already 
overcome. 

The religion of Jesus Christ is par excellence the ethical 
religion. God is the Reality of that which man should 
aim to become. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your 
Father which is in heaven is perfect.” And God’s 
Reality in its inmost essence is Love that transcends all 
commercial and legal distinctions and transactions. 

God is the Perfect Individual because he is wholly and 
completely social. He cares for all. He gives of his life 
without stint. 

The Christian ideal of human life, the Christian stand- 
ard of the good is the same. First of all, in contrast 
with all ethics which involve the negation or suppression 
of individuality, Christ appeals to individuals. The su- 
preme worth and reality of the individual soul, the moral 
freedom and responsibility of the self, is basic in his 
teaching. ‘What shall a man give in exchange for his 
soul?” “Call no man master.” “Ye shall know the truth 
and the truth shall make you free.” 

The ethics and religion of Jesus is built on the most 
tremendous emphasis on the enduring reality, the worth 
and responsible freedom of the individual. In this respect 
he is sounder than Plato, who, in the Republic with its 
excessive regimentation and communism, fails to see that 


124 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


the Good Life cannot be realized unless there be room and 
free play for the individual to make his own independent 
adventure with the natural needs and impulses—economic 
needs and the family life—in winning the Good Life. 
Plato treats individuals too much as mere meeting points 
for the Universal Values, mere occasions for training in 
social service and the contemplative life. 

But on the other hand, Jesus teaches that true indi- 
viduality or spiritual personality (Divine Sonship) is 
realized only in so far as the individual wills and works 
to make himself the organ of the common interests (lives 
in the brotherhood of man). The richest and greatest 
and noblest personality is he who lives most deeply and 
fully, forgetting self, in social and universal relationships. 
The individual who tries to hold what he is born with, 
and not to use it for others, and for the advancement 
of human society, is like the man with the one talent. 
He loses it. He that seeketh to save his life shall lose 
it, and he that loseth his life shall find it. 

Now this is true to the moral psychology of man. 
Growth in comprehensiveness and harmony, expansion 
and organization, happiness, come only to the individual 
who makes himself the organ for the promotion of the 
communal ends. The wider, the deeper and richer one’s 
range of interests becomes, the more one reaches out and 
works in the service of one’s fellows, to promote human 
well-being and social progress, the fuller and more har- 
monious is one’s selfhood. For a self or individual is 
just the organic or living whole of its interests, its experi- 
ences and acts. 

‘‘Forsooth, brothers, fellowship is heaven and the lack 
of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life, and the lack of 


RELIGION AND MORALS 125 


fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do upon the 
earth, it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them, and the 
life that is in it shall live on and on for ever, and each 
one of you part of it, while many a man’s life upon the 
earth, from the earth shall wane.” * 

This is the Christian ethical principle, or standard of 
value for the Good Life. It is not to be taken in any narrow 
sense. ach one is to do his own part in his own way. 
To one it comes by way of cultivating the ground thor- 
oughly and in the spirit of service, to another through 
the fine arts or literature, to other through professional 
service, to still others through the promotion of science 
or learning, or through the social interpretation and appli- 
cation of religion and ethics for his fellows. 

The point is that whatever be one’s station and concrete 
duties and opportunities, the Good Life for the Christian 
is a life in which he, as this unique and responsible indi- 
vidual, takes his part selflessly and joyfully in the ser- 
vice of the good life in man through whatever way is 
given to him and thereby realizes his spiritual personality. 

The Christian ethics and the Christian religion are 
one. The Heavenly Father is the pattern held up by 
Christ. The ever energizing, ever patient, ever caring, 
self-imparting, self-revealing, divine energy of Love is the 
supreme incentive for the good life in man and the guar- 
antee that the good life is supreme and enduring in the 
cosmos. 7 

It is worth while to compare Christ’s doctrine of the 
relations of Ethics and Religion, the Good and God, with 
Aristotle’s. The latter’s theory of the Good in some ways 


1 William Morris, 4 Dream of John Ball.. 


126 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


approaches that of Christ, especially in his treatment of 
friendship and love, but it lacks the element of utter 
sympathy for the weak, the lowly, the astray; it lacks 
the abandon of Christ. And when we come to Aristotle’s 
conception of God, we find that God, for him, has no 
share in the practical or moral virtues. Only the practice 
of the contemplative life, only the passionless and untiring 
activity of pure reason, is divine. God is the eternal and 
blessed activity of pure thought contemplating itself. God 
is not a friend, does not love any man, knows nothing 
of imperfection, toil or suffering. The ordinary virtues 
are not lifted up into the atmosphere of the Eternal. And 
so Aristotle’s ideal life with all its nobility of superiority 
to the baser passions and lower aims remains the higher 
selfishness of one engaged in the passionless and un- 
troubled activity of pure intellectual contemplation. 

Christ’s ideal of life follows from his doctrine of God. 
Man’s goodness consists in becoming Godlike. And to 
become Godlike is to make one’s individuality, one’s 
thought, feeling, and one’s action, the organ or instrument 
for the realization of the divine life in human society 
through service in any of the manifold ways which pro- 
mote the lasting welfare of mankind. 

May not in the future, ethical conviction and action 
be divorced from religion? I think not. Ethical motives, 
ethical standards of value or ethical ends, by their very 
nature, are paramount. They can brook no rivals in 
human interest. To affirm that a principle of action is 
good is to affirm by implication that it is absolutely su- 
preme in its demand for human allegiance. Man must 
continue to believe, unless his ethical aims and motives 
are to suffer from a paralysis, that the Good which is 


RELIGION AND MORALS 127 


supreme over the human interests and motives is nearest 
akin to the Ruling Power of the Universe. And to believe 
this is to be religious. For religion is the faith that the 
Highest Values should and must rule in the human order, 
and are supreme in the Cosmic Order. 


CHAPTER XII 
JESUS AND ECCLESIASTICISM 


Jesus was no ecclesiolater. He did not come to found 
a new Church. He did not even attempt to remake the 
old one. He used it in so far as it served his purpose 
and when its rulers turned on him, he went to his death 
gladly to shatter the old and to create a new order of 
spiritual life. In vain will one search his words for 
authority for Papacy, Episcopacy, Presbyterianism, Con- 
gregationalism or any other -ism. There are, in Jesus’ 
winged words, no prescriptions or hints, liturgical or 
ecclesiastico-political or metaphysico-theological. He cared 
nothing for these things. They belong to the fashion of 
this world which ever passeth away. Like political and 
industrial and social systems, they come and they go. 
They are human devices—inevitable and necessary trap- 
pings and scaffoldings for the expression of religion in a 
corporate form or community. But the danger that in 
them lies, is that these mechanics of organization shall 
stifle or thwart the spirit which they should minister 
unto, that the scaffoldings shall hide the building, that 
the trappings shall eat into the soul of religion and de- 
stroy it. 

Jesus left no system of theology or metaphysics. He 
was greater than all such systems. He spoke and worked 

128 


JESUS AND ECCLESIASTICISM 129 


in the living and the concrete—in symbols, in parables, 
in great deeds of love and sacrifice. By these he gathered 
and inspired a handful of faithful disciples; and touched 
for a brief time a larger crowd of followers who melted 
away at his death. 

What did Jesus do? With unexampled insight, power 
and vigor of will, he reaffirmed the principles of universal 
or spiritual religion. He conveyed, by the magic touch of 
his personality, a new dynamic influence which was per- 
petuated by his sacrificial death; and which has gone 
forward and multiplied itself a millionfold ever since, as 
does every great spiritual impulse in human life. 


What are these principles of Jesus? In sum, they are “ 


as follows: 

1. That only the inward life, the life of the soul or 
spirit, is of supreme value. That all real value flows from 
within outwards into deeds of honesty, of courage, of love, 
of sacrifice. “What shall a man give in exchange for his 
soul?’ ‘The life is more than meat and the body than 
raiment.” “A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance 
of the things that he possesseth.” 

2. That the quality of one’s acts depends on one’s mo- 
tives, on the values expressed therein. “Blessed are the 
pure in heart [those whose motives are clean, honest and 
disinterested] for they shall see God.” 

3. That the more abundant lfe—the life that is rich 
and harmonious—requires a continual forgetting of self 
in the service of others and of superpersonal causes, “He 
that seeketh his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life 
for my sake and for the sake of the good news shall 
save it.” 

4, That one’s life must be whole, integral. This is 


130 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


what purity of heart means. “If thine eye be single thy 
whole body shall be full of light.” 

5. That the true life is one of fellowship. It requires 
the practice of forgiveness, fair play, service. 

6. That men should trust the God of nature whatever 
happens. For he who cares for the things of nature cares 
much more for the human soul. 

Jesus founded a community, a fellowship of free and 
loving souls. Only in this sense was he the founder of 
a Church. All polities, sacraments, doctrines, teachings 
on the part of those who claim to inherit his spirit and - 
to work in his name are to be judged as subservient to 
the furtherance of the motives and principles of conduct 
in the Jesuanic community. Whether any so-called 
Christian Church is Christlike is to be determined in the 
light of the motives and principles for valuing feeling 
and conduct which Jesus communicated and which his 
spirit, the Holy Spirit which he promised to guide and 
comfort us men, still communicates to all who are of one 
mind with Jesus. He, as I have said, made no attempt 
to set up a system of theology or metaphysics; much less 
a system of church polity. His was a mighty energy of 
will. His power of appeal is primarily and fundamentally 
to the feelings and the will. He does not ignore reason 
or thought, but he sees that it must be an auxiliary coun- 
selor, interpreter and guide—that it works by its reflex 
influence on men’s feelings and volitions. Therefore, the 
motives and standards of conduct, the value judgments 
on life’s aims and ideals which Jesus sets up, are directed 
primarily to the sublimation, harmonization, ennoblement 
and energization of human feelings and volitions. 

What is the community for Jesus? ‘Wherever two or 


JESUS AND ECCLESIASTICISM 131 


three are gathered together in my name, there am I in 
the midst of them.” “By their fruits ye shall know 
them.” “Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of 
thistles?”? ‘He that heareth my words and doeth them, I 
will liken unto the man that builded his house on a rock.” 
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sab- 
bath ;”’ that is, all institutions, even churches, are instru- 
ments for fostering and furthering the more abundant 
life. “My yoke is easy and my burden light.” 

What are the tests of the kind of conduct which makes 
one a member of the community of Jesus? “Inasmuch 
as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my 
brethren ye have done it unto me.” ‘Forgive, even unto 
seventy times seven.” ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as 
thyself.”’ ‘‘Which of the three, thinkest thou, was neigh- 
bor to him that fell among the thieves?’ “Among the 
Gentiles they which exercise lordship over them are ac- 
counted great but it shall not be so among you.” ‘‘Who- 
soever would be greatest among you let him be the servant 
of all. For the Son of Man came not to be ministered 
unto but to minister and to give his life a ransom for 
many.” 

And what of the right motives? “Out of the abundance 
of the heart the mouth speaketh.” The right motives are 
abundantly expressed in the Beatitudes, in the Sermon on 
the Mount. 

The creed of Jesus is the confession in one’s heart and 
by one’s deeds of the supremacy of integrity and purity 
of aim, of the supreme value of the moral personality 
over every other value in the world, of the supreme worth 
of the life of good will, honest work and service, fellow- 
ship and love. Active participation in these motives and 


132 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


aims, acceptance of these values as the ruling standards 
of life, alone make a Christian. All else is as sounding 
brass and tinkling cymbal. The Church of Christ is 
there, and there alone, wherever men live and love and 
work in fellowship for the furtherance of these humane 
and spiritual values. 


CHAPTER XIIT 
HISTORY, PERSONALITY AND TRUTH 


The religious feelings, beliefs and practices of every 
age are interwoven with the entire culture of that age. 
Moreover, in each age the religious attitudes and beliefs 
of persons living on different cultural planes vary with 
their planes. The individual’s religious attitude is pro- 
foundly interpenetrated by his entire set of mind. The 
latter is determined largely by his cultural environment. 
In turn the religious attitude profoundly influences the 
other cultural attitudes of a man—his attitudes towards 
art, sclence, morality, politics. The peculiar and para- 
doxical feature common to religion and philosophy is this: 
whereas they are integral parts of the entire system of 
culture of a people and a time as of the entire cultural 
complex of the individual’s mind, they bring at once to 
a burning focus the various currents in the life of culture, 
and in summing up a whole culture they aim to transcend 
it by viewing its transitory features in the light of the 
Eternal or transtemporal Reality. 

It is impossible that the religion of a peasant should 
be the same as the religion of a savant; that the religion 
of an artist should be identical with that of a gravedigger. 
Spiritual individuality is the resultant of the interplay 
of cultural environment and native capacity. This indi- 
viduality is manifested in religion, no less than in the 

133 


1384 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


other chief phases of culture. It is impossible that the 
religion of a Hottentot, an Arab, a Hindu, a Chinaman 
and an Englishman should be the same. But, as human- 
istic and scientific culture spreads, and becomes common 
to persons of different races, as the higher cultures of 
various stocks draw close together, their religions become 
more alike than the religions of two persons of the same 
race, but living on different cultural planes, 

The possibility of close similarity and sympathy in 
religious attitudes depends on the sharing of a community 
of culture which gives rise to profound spiritual sympathy. 
A completely universal religion of humanity can arrive 
only with the development of a universally humane cul- 
ture. 

All great religions have had a long historical develop- 
ment. The Mohammedan is the youngest of these (unless 
one regard Christian Science as one of the great religions). 
But Mohammedanism did not spring full-armed from the 
brow of Mohammed. Its roots stretch far back into the 
soil of the Hebraic and Arabic cultures. 

As culture changes, religion changes with it, just as 
do poetry and the other arts, philosophy and science. 
Religion is not at all exempt from the universal historical 
flux—from the ebb and flow of human cultures. It shares 
in the vicissitudes of civilization. Great creative or syn- 
thetic and unifying epochs of human culture are followed 
by periods of gradual disintegration; the latter in turn 
by periods of reconstruction, flowering again in new crea- 
tive epochs. Christianity has not been, more than other 
religions, exempt from this law of historic change. The 
Christianity of every great age has been a synthesis, a 
fusion into spiritual focus, of all the cultural currents 


HISTORY, PERSONALITY AND TRUTH § 1385 


which have made the age distinctive. Every organized 
religious system is the child of time. 

The apostolic age represents the first step in the fusion 
of Hebrew prophetism and Hellenistic culture. The 
apostolic age is succeeded by the gradual upbuilding of 
a Catholic Christendom into which Hellenistic culture and 
the mystery religions enter powerfully. Catholic Christ- 
endon undergoes a schism. Western Catholic Christendom 
is built up into a unified system, and then disintegrates 
as a result of the maturing of new powers which it has. 
nurtured—new intellectual, aesthetic, moral and political 
forces break it apart. Protestantism goes to the extreme 
of religious pluralism in its division into sects. Once 
again, at the present moment the cry is raised for a new 
spiritual synthesis, a new unification of religion. 

But it is vain to base this program of a new synthesis 
on the return to, the reinstitution and revivification of 
any past epoch. Some would find the key in medieval 
Catholicism, others in a return to the undivided Christ- 
endom before the great schism, still others in the return 
to apostolic Christianity. All these plans are based on 
illusions—vain dreams. No past period of Christianity 
can be restored in its original integrity, any more than 
we could now restore the Periclean culture of Athens. 
A religious synthesis, valid for to-day and to-morrow, must 
arise from the fusion into a spiritual and dynamic unity 
of all the cultural and spiritual forces operative to-day 
and in which reside the making of to-morrow’s day. Let 
us have done once and for all with the vain delusion that 
we can think and live as did the apostles, the Greek 
Fathers, St. Augustine, or the thirteenth-century Chris- 
tians. 


136 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


The great prophets and revealers of moral and religious 
principles, those who bring new creative insights and a 
fresh dynamic into religion, do not escape this law of 
cultural causality and change. Every great religious 
genius shared in the ideas, beliefs and attitudes of his 
own time. Gotama Buddha is unintelligible except from 
the background of Bralmanic ritual, asceticism and brood- 
ing pantheistic speculation. Isaiah and the other great 
prophets of Israel cannot be understood apart from the 
religious, cultural and political life currents of their 
people and their time. To understand Isaiah we must 
understand the background of the life of Judea and the 
foreground of international politics and wars, of the em- 
pires of Assyria and Egypt, and the little peoples whose 
lands were the theaters of their contentions. 

Even Jesus, the greatest creative personality in the 
history of religion, is not entirely exempt from this law 
of cultural limitation. He inherited Hebrew prophetism. 
He had to react to Hebrew legalism and ceremonialism. 
He shared the cosmology and psychology, the physiology 
and perhaps even the demonology of his people. He took 
up and radically transformed, in the alembic of his mar- 
velously creative personality, the long hoped for and 
eagerly awaited Messianic Kingdom of his own people. 
He speaks in terms of the culture of his day and his 
people. He seems to have expected that the Kingdom of 
God, whose herald he was, would come suddenly in its 
completeness with catastrophic power and that He would 
return then as the Messiah. His intense devotion to the 


1 This is the one unsolved riddle in Jesus’ teaching as reported in 
the Gospels. If he believed in the imminent apocalyptic parusia, 
then there is an inconsistency between this aspect of his doctrine of 


a ee 


HISTORY, PERSONALITY AND TRUTH 137 


ideal of the Kingdom led him to accept the challenge of 
death as a critical step in bringing it to pass. For him 
it was all in all. Nothing else mattered but the Kingdom 
and the awakening of men to fit themselves for life therein. 

Jesus was mistaken in several things. But they were 
the mistakes of a transcendent religious genius, a great 
spirit on fire with the vision of hitherto unrevealed divine 
potencies in the life of man. The Psalmist writes “the 
zeal of thine house hath eaten me up,” “My meat and 
drink is to do thy will, O Lord.” For Jesus, meat and 
drink and life itself were instruments to enkindle in men 
the desire and will to realize a richer life—one of greater 
individual power, integrity and spiritual harmony, one of 
deeper and wider human fellowship and communion with 
God. Consumed with zeal for the Kingdom, all earthly 
and worldly things were foreshortened for Jesus. He 
saw and lived for the Kingdom of spiritual personalities 
alone. ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and its right- 
eousness.” All merely mundane values shrivel up in the 
presence of the Kingdom. 

It is vain to attempt to reconcile the literal interpreta- 
tion of all Jesus’ teachings with the conditions of culture, 
to-day. We cannot live in daily and hourly expectation 
of the cataclysmic coming of the Kingdom in all its power. 
We cannot even sell all we have and give to the poor. 
We have to continue to live in an imperfect order and to 
make haste slowly in ethical and spiritual matters. We 
have to compromise with Cxsar and Mammon, to be 
somewhat anxious for the morrow, to live in a world ruled 


the Kingdom and the doctrine of its ethical inwardness. If he did 
not so believe, then he was gravely misreported. There is much to 
be said for either view, on the whole I prefer the latter interpretation. 


138 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


largely by unspiritual agencies. If we accept the spiritual 
authority of Jesus we shall, so far as in us lies, live as 
in this world, but not of it. We shall strive to keep our 
spirits free and clean from the taints of greeds, lusts, 
envies, hates, lies, hardness of heart and selfish satis- 
faction. 

Those who assert that the validity of religion stands 
or falls with physical miracles should, to be logical, go 
farther and say that the authority of Jesus requires us 
to change our modes of living and put ourselves in readi- 
ness for the imminent cataclysmic arrival of the Kingdom, 
which cometh as a thief in the night, and therefore one 
may wake up to-morrow, either in the Kingdom or bound 
with Satan. The logical outcome of traditionalism is 
millennialism of the crassest sort. 

It is the most unintelligent, unhistorical dogmatism to 
insist that past events in the history of religion are abso- 
lutely and completely authoritative and binding on the 
intellect and spirit of man to-day. ‘The true historical 
outlook teaches one that there is no finality, no finished 
completeness, in any past epoch of man’s spiritual or 
general cultural life. The eternal values of the spirtual 
life cannot be grounded on the contingent events of his- 
tory (a paraphrase of Lessing). Hach age, as Leopold 
von Ranke said, is tmmediate to God. It must find and 
validate its now supreme values. The past is alive and 
effective only in so far as it enters into and is assimilated 
with the living and growing present. The words and 
works of the great spiritual leaders of the past are writ- 
ten for our instruction, for our example, for our inspira- 
tion. We cannot literally copy them. We cannot ex- 
tinguish or suppress the ethical motives and spiritual val- 


De elle 


HISTORY, PERSONALITY AND TRUTH = 139 


ues which legitimately arise for us from our own culture 
—from our sciences and arts and letters, from our changed 
relations to nature and to our fellow men. We are dis- 
covering many things in regard to nature and human 
nature that the forefathers knew not. These new things 
are the determining conditions of a sane, harmonious and 
balanced culture. The true function of the race’s spirit- 
ual leaders in the past is to help us now to live our lives 
out, aided by their companionship; not to suppress the 
new values that arise in the present for us, nor to induce 
us to turn our backs on the promise of the future in the 
vain effort to restore literally what was temporal and 
transitory in the past. The true value of any great 
movement in the past is to enrich the living present. 

What, then, is left of Jesus and historic Christianity ? 
Is anything left? Yes, so much of spiritual power and 
insight as can be taken up and used in harmony with the 
intellectual and’ cultural life of the present. The test 
of Jesus and all further developments of historic Chris- 
tianity is this—what do they contribute to the enrich- 
ment, ennoblement and harmonization of man’s cultural 
life to-day? How far will the values they expressed 
enter into working union with the values of the scientific 
outlook and method and with the new humanism for 
which man, in his actualities and the promise of his life, is 
the present summit of the long travail of nature to give 
birth to higher spiritual individuality ? 

Great creative personalities are conditioned by the cul- 
tures of their races and epochs. But they are great crea- 
tive personalities because they rise somehow above the 
average cultural stream of the times and thus contribute 
to that transtemporal or eternally creative spiritual life 


140 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


which is above their own times. By their contributions 
to the race’s insights, visions, powers, they become con- 
temporaneous with all time. In recreating, in bringing 
to a new focus, the spiritual currents of their own day, the 
creative personalities labor for eternity—for the perma- 
nent that endures through all that is transitory. 

Socrates and Plato belonged to their own time. But 
for us they have stimulating, instructing and inspiring 
values because of what is eternally human and spiritual 
in their thought. Isaiah belonged to his own time. But, 
across the ages, we can apply his prophetic burden of 
social justice and mercy to our very different times and 
social problems, 

Shakespeare belonged to his time. But his time does 
not account for the perennial timeliness of Shakespeare 
to every age. 

So it is supremely with Jesus. He, the supreme relig- 
lous genius of all time, is above every time. Therefore 
he speaks quickening words and stirs the hearts of men 
in every time. The Kingdom did not and will not come 
suddenly by a cosmic cataclysm. But the Kingdom re- 
mains to challenge us, to prod us out of spiritual sloth 
and materialism, out of sensuality and selfishness, dis- 
honesty, impurity, mammon worship. It remains to stir 
us into the ethical and spiritual aspiration, devotion and 
service without which we retrograde below the animals. 
Thus He belongs at the head of that small and choice com- 
pany of the immortals who are eternal; who, because of 
something timeless and transcendent in their visions and 
words, deeds and personalities, are relevant to every time. 

In all that concerns the higher life of man, truth is 
not established and made good by extraneous supports. 


HISTORY, PERSONALITY AND TRUTH 141 


The witness of the spirit is the supreme witness. Across 
the centuries, from age to age, the vital insights and con- 
victions of spiritual humankind grow in clearness and 
fullness. There is change and there is progress. In this 
progressive change whatsoever is of eternal value in the 
past deeds of creative personalities is not lost. It is taken 
up and added to, but it remains a vital influence in the 
creative travail of the spirit. 

A philosophy, a great work of art, or a scientific truth, 
may have something eternally human and spiritual in it. 
But all the works of man are subject to the vicissitudes of 
time. The personality itself has more of the eternal than 
any of its works and words. 

This is supremely the case with Jesus. We cannot 
accept and obey all his words literally. We cannot think 
or believe as he did in every respect. 

But, through the fragmentary and confusing records of 
his words, his works, his sacrifice of self, there ever gleams 
brightly that unapproachably lovely, arresting, challeng- 
ing, Inspiring and lovable Personality,—the ‘“‘what is” 
which is behind and greater than the “what knows” or 
“what does.” 

Jesus is greater than all his teachings, greater than 
the Kingdom. For He is the supreme summit of the 
Divine in Man. 

This is what is timeless in Him, and therefore He 
speaks to every time. The Spirit of Jesus, speaking and 
touching to finer issues, to nobler aspirations, to sterner 
resolves and more selfless devotions, alike the letter-bound 
traditionalist, the unlettered peasant, the skeptical phi- 
losopher and scientist, the recluse and the man of the 
world, the sage and the ruler—this is the witness to the 


142 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


only truth we need—that a life lived in communion with 
his essential spirit is the loveliest and noblest and most 
satisfying life possible to man—lIt is man’s way of ap- 
proach to Divine Perfection—‘That ye may be perfect 
as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” 


ae 


CHAPTER XIV 


APOTHEOSIS AND INCARNATION 


There runs through the history of mankind the per- 
sistent impulse to regard as divine those cultural heroes 
who, by their manifestation, in exceptional degree, of the 
creative mind, discover and proclaim new values. For, 
by such creations the more ordinary level of human beings 
find their lives enriched, their intellectual, practical, so- 
cial and moral horizons widened, and new power and 
meaning brought into human existence. Discoverers of 
the secrets of nature, devisers of new arts of life, law- 
givers, moral prophets, poets, are regarded as inspired 
of God. They are raised to the rank of divine or semi- 
divine beings. Complementary to the apotheosis of the 
cultural heroes is the belief in the zncarnation of the 
Divine in human personalities. In nearly all important 
religions there is a belief in incarnation—for example, in 
Hinduism, Buddhism, the religions of the ancient Egyp- 
tians and Greeks. 

In proportion as man attains a more refined and ele- 
vated consciousness of the true values of life, in propor- 
tion as his conception of life’s goods becomes more spir- 
itual, in proportion as he gains a clearer feeling of the 
highest and most enduring meanings of his existence, 
just in the same measure does his conception of incarna- 
tion increase in elevation and range of meaning. 

143 


144 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


It is no part of my aim here to sketch the whole process 
of this development. I pass at once to consider the sum- 
mit of the pre-Christian doctrine of incarnation. This 
summit was attained by Plato and his followers. For 
him the intrinsic values, or goods which give meaning, 
worth and permanence to the human soul are all purely 
intellectual, asethetic and moral. These three forms of 
value compass the whole spiritual life. Human life be- 
comes worthy to endure, it acquires a divine meaning 
through the participation of the soul in the life of ration- 
ality, beauty, and goodness. In so far as man seriously 
examines his own life and the world in which he lives in 
order to find what is permanently true; in so far as he 
seeks to rise from the enjoyment of physical beauty into 
the intuition of intellectual and moral beauty in his in- 
ward parts; and in so far as he dedicates his powers to 
the service of integrity, justice and wisdom; man is par- 
ticipating in the Divine. He is becoming Godlike. The 
Platonic ideas, the archetypal forms, which are the su- 
preme and eternal realities, are the manifold forms of the 
eternal life of God. These timeless and dynamic types 
or patterns of being, which are the causal sources of all 
the forms of transitory existence, the sources of the dif- 
ferent types of living organisms, of the orderly relations 
which we find in the world, of the principles of moral 
order in society and of moral harmony and proportion in 
the individual, are incarnations or embodiments of the 
Divine in this changing and imperfect world of space, 
time, and matter. 

Plato held that all these forms of enduring and creative 
value have their unity in God—the Essential Form of the 
Good. God, then, is absolutely good. Plato did not give 


APOTHEOSIS AND INCARNATION 145 


a wholly satisfactory account of the process by which the 
ideas are imparted to the ever-changing things of sense.’ 
He spoke of participation and imitation. In his doctrine 
of the Demwurge, or intermediate agent who creates the 
world, he anticipates the later Logos doctrine. Plato’s 
followers and the Stoics, who were much influenced by 
Plato and who in turn influenced later Platonism, taking 
up Heraclitus’ conception of the Logos, conceived the 
Logos, or Creative Word of God as the source of all the 
order, beauty, meaning and moral value in this ever-per- 
ishing world. God transcends all that is mutable and im- 
perfect. But by his Creative Word he forms and orders 
the world and human life. Thus the Logos is the incar- 
nating power of God, the self-manifestation of God 
throughout the world. The doctrine of the Logos or 
Creative Mind of God (Nous), as being the first step in 
the self-manifestation of the Transcendent and Ineffable 
and Inconceivable One, who is in Himself above all form, 
all duality and multiplicity, reaches its culmination in 
Neo-Platonism. From the One Transcendent Spirit Nous 
or Logos emanates or irradiates. From this in turn comes 
the World-Soul, the Cosmic Psyche, which becomes in- 
earnate in the world-whole of space and time, and gives 
rise to the multitude of incarnate souls, who, though far 
below the One, still share, albeit dimly and unconsciously, 
in the World-forming Mind or Logos of God. 

The Christian theologians took up this great conception 
and identified the fullest expression of the Creative Word 


1 Nor is Plato wholly consistent and clear in regard to the ulti- 
mate relation between the Ideas and God. In the Republic and 
elsewhere he seems to conceive God as the unity and ground of the 
Ideas. But in the Timaeus the Ideas appear as the independently 
real patterns according to which God creates the world. 


146 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


with the person of Jesus Christ. Thus, for Christianity 
the process of incarnation of the Divine is brought to 
complete expression, in so far as God is capable of expres- 
sion in a human being, in Jesus the Christ. He is the 
perfect and unique incarnation of the Divine Word, the 
eternally preéxistent Son of the transcendent Creator- 
Father. 

It is unnecessary here to review in detail the metaphysi- 
cal subtleties involved in the long controversy as to how 
the Incarnate Word could dwell fully in a human person, 
or to pass in critical review all the difficulties and incon- 
sistencies involved in the statements that Jesus the Christ 
was at once the second person of the Divine Trinity, 
eternally begotten of the Father and a truly human being 
who was born, lived and died subject to all the limitations 
and sufferings of a human person; or to inquire how a 
real man cou!d be of the same substance with the Eternal 
God; and how two different natures and two wills could 
eoexist in one human individual and that individual still 
be wholly perfect, an integral human person. 

What I wish to bring out here is simply the spiritual 
purport and motivating source of this doctrine. Its 
motive is clear. The Logos doctrine of the Incarnation 
18 an expression of the spiritual conviction that in the life 
of Jesus and the death on the Cross was embodied the 
highest, the holiest, spiritually the loveliest and noblest 
life possible to man. It expresses the faith that in his 
essential nature God must be most like Christ. There- 
fore Christ is most divine. This momentous faith in the 
identical quality of Christ’s will towards men and God’s 
everlasting purpose is what is at stake in the doctrine of 
one substance. It is only in the spirit that one can call 


APOTHEOSIS AND INCARNATION 147 


Jesus Lord. It is Spirit that beareth witness with our 
spirits. This faith and insight arises from a judgment of 
moral and spiritual values. 

In other terms, if the Christ life is the life of highest 
qualitative value, then, since God is the supreme Reality 
of all Spiritual Values, this Life is most divine. This 
life is the life of Love absolute and giving itself without 
stint for the redemption of man from bondage to his 
lower nature. The Cross is the symbol of the complete- 
ness of this Love. Christ is pure and integral, a whole 
and completely righteous person and his supreme quality 
is Love. Love is the quality of selfhood which takes up 
into itself and transvalues all other values. God is Love, 
and Jesus is Divine because God is Love. And God must 
be Love, since Jesus is the one whose touch kindles into 
flame the smoldering love-potency in the heart of man. 
He that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. The 
Incarnate Word is Love. 

With Heraclitus the Logos principle is the immanent 
Divine Ordering Principle or Law which pervades and 
controls the endless flux of nature. Just as for Spinoza, 
so for Heraclitus God is the indwelling Order of the 
world. His Logos is a pantheistic principle. With Plato 
and Aristotle, God in Himself transcends the order of 
nature. The Platonic ideas are both transcendent and 
immanent—transcendent in their own eternal reality, 
immanent in this realm of space, time and the transitory 
multitude of imperfect beings; inasmuch as the sensible 
and changing world participates in the ideal forms which 
are the eternal realities. With Aristotle the forms (the 
formative powers or entelechies which impel and shape 
matter into individuals or actualities) are wholly imma- 


148 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


nent in nature. But God, the Supreme Form, is wholly 
transcendent. The Stoics vacillated between an imma- 
nent conception of the Logos and one which makes Him 
the mediating link or creative principle through which 
the transcendent God creates and acts on the world. In 
the main, later Platonism conceived the Logos to be iden- 
tical in function with Plato’s Demiurge. He is the unity 
of the Ideas, the creative intermediary between the inac- 
cessible and unknown God and the world. He is a second 
divine Principle or Entity, through which the world is 
created and ordered. In Philo, Clement and Origen this 
conception prevails. It is also held by Clement and Ori- 
gen that the Logos God revealed himself through wise 
men and prophets before Christ. For Clement and Origen 
He is the spermatic Logos who has revealed himself par- 
tially before Christ but first fully in Christ.’ 

In the orthodox Christian conception (of Athanasius) 
the Logos is no longer chiefly the intermediate creative 
principle between God and his world. God creates the 
world directly. The Logos ts the dwine Principle of re- 
demption. His function is to save men. He is not pri- 
marily a cosmological principle but a soteriological prin- 
ciple, the instrument of salvation. 

Thus a conception which originated in the pantheistic 
thought of an immanent Divine order in nature and de- 
veloped into an instrument for connecting the transcen- 
dent God with the world of matter and natural life be- 
comes transformed into a wholly moral or spiritual prin- 
ciple, the Divine instrument of salvation. God the Logos 

2 Dean Inge’s article on ‘‘Religion’’ in the book, The Legacy of 
Greece, edited by R. W. Livingstone, is the most compact statement 


I have seen on the contribution of Greek thought to the Christian 
religion. 


APOTHEOSIS AND INCARNATION 149 


becomes man in order to enable man, through faith and 
obedience, to become divine. Incarnation its the presup- 
position of apotheosts. Thus the ancient Catholic doctrine 
is, essentially, an expression of the supremacy in the uni- 
verse of those spiritual values embodied in the life of 
Christ and supremely witnessed to on the Cross. To say 
that Christ is the Incarnate Word is to affirm that his 
way is the supreme truth and the way to Eternal Life. 

It is quite another question to ask what is the valid 
meaning of the Logos doctrine to-day for one who accepts 
the methods and principles of biology, psychology and 
eritical historical inquiry. 

For many centuries of human thought, dualistic super- 
naturalism was not an effete tradition. It was the natural 
view of most men. It is still the view of those whose 
minds have not been indoctrinated with the scientific 
standpoint. Dualistic supernaturalism is native to those 
minds for whom nature is not an ordered and dynamic 
whole, but only the theater of order in part, order inter- 
rupted in many spots by the eruption of mysterious hap- 
penings for which no antecedent natural conditions can 
be found. In so far as men to-day have the scientific 
point of view, the notion of a nature which runs in parts 
by itself, and in parts and at times is altered by the inter- 
vention of an extramundane power, has gone by the 
boards. Dualistic supernaturalism and the deistic doc. 
trine of an absentee Cosmic Artificer are both effete tra- 
ditions. 

The Logos Christology was a living and meaningful 
doctrine for those who formed it. But it did, as it is 
generally understood, reduce the humanity of Christ al- 
most to a vanishing point. Our intellectual climate is 


150 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


not the climate of those who framed it. Not even our 
moral climate is the same. Our scale of human values is 
different. Our problem is to humanize and spiritualize 
the complex industrial and scientific and aesthetic inter- 
ests of the contemporary world. 

Many traditionalists talk glibly about the three persons 
in the Trinity, as if this meant three distinct Divine 
Centers of self-consciousness and will. They assume that 
our Lord was really a preéxistent Divine Being who took 
upon himself the semblance of a man (Docetism), while 
remaining omnipotent and omniscient. They are seem- 
ingly ignorant of the fact that the words for “substance” 
and “person” in the Greek, namely, ousza and hypostasvs, 
originally meant the same, and were only gradually dif- 
ferentiated in the process of theological debate. They 
overlook the fact that prosopon (persona), which Tertul- 
han used as the equivalent of hypostasis, meant a mask 
or character, not a true self, and that in Roman terminol- 
ogy a person was simply a legal subject of rights; whereas 
a person to-day means an individual center of experience 
and action. 

The truth is that person in the Nicene theology does 
not mean an wdwidual self. Person means here a dis- 
tinctive office or function and relationship in the Godhead. 
God the Father means the eternally primal creative, sus- 
taining and governing function of Deity. God the Son 
means the teaching, guiding and redemptive function of 
the immanent Godhead in human life. (God the Holy 
Spirit means the continuance of the Son’s work as guide, 
teacher and sanctifier. The work of the Son and the 
Holy Spirit cannot really be distinguished. In Paul’s 
theology they are not distinguished. He speaks of the 


APOTHEOSIS AND INCARNATION 151 


Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of God and the Spirit as hav- 
ing the same office. He uses these three terms inter- 
changeably. 

These traditionalists are ready to proclaim the eternal 
preéxistence of Jesus Christ, though this logically involves 
a contravention of the principles of heredity as well as 
Tritheism and Docetism. The sad fact is that most of 
our traditionalists are ignorant of the development of 
Greek philosophical terminology from Heraclitus to Ori- 
gen, the Cappadocians and the Neo-Platonists. No one 
can follow intelligently the development of classical Chris- 
tian theology who does not know Greek philosophy. They 
are also ignorant of the methods and results of modern 
physics, biology, psychology and philosophy. A further 
instance may be given—the problem of the growth of 
personality in man is the mtegration, the fashioning into 
one harmonious whole, of his native capacities. The 
integration of a personality is expressed in unity and 
consistency of thought and volition. How then could 
Jesus have had two wills? A perfect person cannot have 
two wills. 

The Logos doctrine was a great contribution to the 
clarification and defense of Christian thought in its own 
day. That day was centuries long. It saved Christian- 
ity from Gnosticism. It affirmed that the creative thought 
of the One God is the continuously active ground of nature 
and that He revealed himself in prophets and wise men 
before Christ, but chiefly and most fully in Christ; as 
fully as was possible within the limitations of humanity. 
The Logos doctrine in the hands of Philo was primarily 
a cosmological doctrine. The Logos was the Divine Medi- 

ating Principle of creation, intermediary between the 


152 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


transcendent, unapproachable and ineffable majesty of 
God and the natural order of matter and life. The pre- 
supposition of the doctrine that the Logos is a distinct 
hypostasis or entity is the dualistic conception of God’s 
relation to nature. From this standpoint, God is, in Hum- 
self, that is, as Father, wholly transcendent. The Logos 
is God, but subordinate to the Father (eternally gener- 
ated, as Origen says). After the identification in the 
prologue of St. John’s Gospel of the person of Christ with 
the full manifestation of the Logos, the emphasis of the 
concept shifts from cosmology to soteriology. Finally, the 
preéxistent Logos is, in the Chalcedonian formula, identi- 
fied wholly with the Saviour. The cosmological interest 
recedes wholly into the background. Harnack makes this 
point clear in his Dogmengeschichte. 

The origin and development. of the Logos doctrine, as 
religious metaphysics, premises a dualistic cosmology. 
God created the world, but, as Father, He wholly tran- 
scends it. He creates and sustains the world by the in- 
strumentality of a second divine principle or being—the 
Logos. Now, no metaphysics which is in touch with 
modern science can accept such an ultimate dualism. 
From our point of view the whole universe is dynamic. 
There is no dead matter in it. It is the eternally creative 
evolutionary process—creative but orderly. There are no 
uncaused events in the universe of reality. There is no 
chaos in it. There are only different orders—the order 
of physical becoming, the order of vital creativeness, the 
order of mental and spiritual creativeness. One order is 
built upon the order next below it. Life’s creativity is 
built upon the material order, ihe spirit’s creativity is 
built upon the vital order. God is the eternally ener- 


APOTHEOSIS AND INCARNATION 153 


gizing and all-comprehending ordering Principle of the 
whole. While He is nature’s principle of immanent order, 
He must transcend the highest reaches of finite existence. 
But His transcendence is not a spatial or temporal tran- 
scendence. He is never absent in place or time from any 
part of His universe. His transcendence is one of value, 
one of richness and perfection, of spiritual individuality. 
His innermost nature is, in principle, identical with man’s 
spiritual quality. But He is not equally present in all 
men. He is most fully revealed in the Perfect Man, 
Jesus of Nazareth. If we take the Logos doctrine to 
express our faith simply in the continuous and increasing 
manifestation of God in nature and humanity, then it 
has both a religious and a philosophical value. If we take 
it as implying a distinct and separate mediator between 
the unknowable and unapproachable God and the world, it 
has no religious or philosophical value for a scientific 
thinker who will think things out to the end. 

There are two working principles or postulates which 
lie at the root of modern science and research. (1) The 
principle of order, often miscalled the principle of the 
uniformity of nature. Nature is not uniform. It 1s com- 
plex and multiform. But through all the web of its com- 
plexity runs the woof of creative causal order. Nothing 
happens without an adequate cause. A final cause can 
be only the synthetic meaning of a series of efficient 
causes. (2) The experimental method. Truth is found 
and verified by the incessant interplay of theory and ob- 
servation. Facts yield their meanings to the observing 
and probing mind. Theories are verified or rejected by 
the test of fact. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” 
Physical miracles are rejected, not because they are a 


154 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


priort impossible, but because they are not in harmony 
with the principle of order and are unverifiable by the 
experimental method. If taken to be true they imply 
thus far a disorderly universe and a defect in either the 
Thought or Power of God. These two principles of sci- 
entific procedure receive ever-increasing corroboration 
from day to day. 

We cannot to-day accept the Logos doctrine in its an- 
cient form. For we cannot understand how two natures 
which begin by being wholly different (by hypothesis) 
can coexist in one person, who thus has two wills, two 
minds and yet is one person. We cannot admit that 
Jesus Christ is the solitary exception to the laws of per- 
sonality. Moreover, the Synoptic Gospels do not support 
such a doctrine. We must begin with the human person 
of Jesus, Finding incarnated in Him the supreme moral 
and spiritual values, finding in Him our elder brother, 
we can say that the Divine Life, the Ground and Source 
of all Spiritual Values, is most fully embodied in Him, 
that He is the first born of many brethren. In this sense 
He is recognized by faith and love as the Highest Incar- 
nation of the Divine, the Supremest Embodiment of Spir- 
itual Values. The Divine in man, which in other men 
is less clearly embodied in varying degrees, in some almost 
entirely effaced, has its consummate expression in Him 
who is the Way, the Truth, the Life for men. He is 
“God Incarnate, man Divine,” not by being isolated from 
other human beings, but by being the fullest, the most 
perfect incarnation in a human personality of those spir- 
itual capacities which are latent and obscured, or at best 
but imperfectly and disjointedly embodied, in other men. 

We speak of spiritual values—of rationality and truth, 


APOTHEOSIS AND INCARNATION 155 


of justice and integrity, of beauty and love—as values 
which guide the spiritually minded man. But we must 
remember that values presuppose persons or rational 
selves. Apart from persons, values are abstractions de- 
void of real existence. Persons realize and enjoy their 
spiritual capacities in the service of the higher, the more 
comprehensive harmonies and enduring values. But 
values obtain and maintain being, only in persons. It is 
a meaningless substantialization of pure abstractions to 
talk of the supremacy and permanence of values unless 
these values exist in and for and through persons. And 
equally so spirit, mind, thought, will, have no existence 
except as ways of describing the real lives of persons. The 
phrase “an impersonal spirit” is utter nonsense. 
Personality is imperfect in us, and the meaning and 
purpose of the universe is the continuous development of 
personal spirits. God is the Infinite and Eternal Ground 
of Spiritual Life; therefore, of Personality. The supreme 
greatness of Christ consists in His person. Through the 
meager and not wholly consistent records there gleams a 
marvelous genially human individual, and yet one who 
lives in the atmosphere of the Eternal—no ascetic, no 
legislator or logic-chopper, but one who reveals the highest 
moral possibilities of human personality, one who lives 
fully and sympathetically in the stream of time, sharing 
the life of man, and yet lifts this life up into the Eternal. 
The profoundest mystery, the deepest meaning of human 
life lies here—that man is a sensuous, physically and 
temporally conditioned being, an animal subject to the 
hazards and contingencies of animal existence, and yet 
one who finds no rest nor peace for his soul amidst the 
shifting sands of time; one who hungers and thirsts for 


156 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


the Eternal, whose efforts towards righteousness, rational- 
ity and beauty are the triune aspects of his striving for 
communion with the Ultimately Worthful, for possession 
of the Eternally Perfect. The great duality in man is 
not between flesh and spirit but between the temporal and 
the eternal; between the fragmentary and transitory on 
the one hand, and the complete and integral life on the 
other hand. 

Jesus, in his person, is the supreme revealer of the 
spiritual possibilities of man, of the way in which the 
human hunger for righteousness and love may be satis- 
fied. He does not stand alone. But He stands at the 
head of the race, as the highest human incarnation of 
the Divine in man, If there were no tendency and urge 
towards the eternal and perfect in humanity, Jesus would 
have no real message for men. A wholly isolated Divine 
Phenomenon can have nothing fruitful for thinking men. 
The Divine Urge must belong to man as such. Jesus is 
the first born of countless brethren, as being the fullest 
realization, the promise and inspiration to other men to 
live in and for spiritual harmony. His apotheosis is 
justified, because He is the consummation, thus far, of 
the ever-continuing immanent Incarnation of the Divine 
in human life. , 

Here is indeed a mystery—that man, so weak and pas- 
sionate and foolish, should yet have in him this Divine 
Urge, this “sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go.” We 
do not know why such a creature as man, a being capable 
of such folly, cruelty, meanness, should yet have this 
Divine Urge. But so it is. Search the serious literature 
of all ages, search the traditions and records of the race, 
search your own heart, and you find it there! 


APOTHEOSIS AND INCARNATION 157 


It is no derogation of the spiritual majesty and moral 
power of Christ to say that the Incarnate Life of God, 
which came to full flower in him, was finding expression 
in the race’s spiritual leaders and even in their humblest 
followers before Christ, and that it is continued in all 
who, wittingly or unwittingly, walk in his footsteps. God, | 
the supreme source and sustainer of the spiritual values 
of personality, is always incarnating Himself in human 
life. Jesus makes us, by the enkindling touch of his 
moral integrity and his spiritual beauty, more fully and 
clearly aware of this continuing incarnation or personali- 
zation of values. “He was in the world and the world 
knew him not. He came unto his own and his own re- 
ceived him not. But to as many as received him to them 
gave he power to become the sons of God.” ‘For he that 
is born of Love receiveth God and knoweth God.” ‘For 
they are born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh, nor 
of the will of man, but of the Will of God.” The Incar- 
nation as consummated in Christ ‘is the complete revela- 
tion of fact which was hitherto not realized, rather than 
an absolutely new fact.’ ° 

If we drop the vain controversies about the preéxistence 
and eternal generation of a Person who is supposed to 
unite two different natures and two distinct wills in one 
individuality, we can retain the Logos doctrine in the 
sense that in the spiritual life of humanity, of which the 
Christ life is the norm and touchstone, the Word or self- 
realizing spirit and will of God is being incarnated in 
Man, under the leadership of the Man in whom this in- 
carnation was most fully realized. “The Spirit himself 


8Guy Rendall, The Historical Element in Christianity. Hibberi 
Journal, vol. XXII, pp. 152-153. 


158 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children 
of God; and if children then heirs; heirs of God and joint 
heirs with Christ.” Romans viii: 16, 17. “For as many 
as are led by the Spirit [as many as serve and live by the 
Supreme Values], these are the Sons of God.’ Romans 
viii: 14. “Even so the things of God none knoweth, save 
the Spirit of God.” I. Cor. 11:11. (See, also, Galatians 
v: 22-24 on the fruits of the Spirit.) 


The recognition of the supreme values through the 
continuous shattering of our worldly values and the re- 
molding of them into the fashion of the Christ-Life—the 
transformation of self-seeking into service, of double- 
mindedness into integrity, of compromise into truth-seek- 
ing, of competition into codperation and fellowship—is 
the rebirth of the natural individual animal into a spir- 
itual personality. This continuous fulfillment of person- 
ality through devotion to the rational and moral order of 
spiritual values is the life of God in the soul of man. The 
Reality of God dawns upon us as we serve those supreme 
values whose service is perfect freedom, since it is the 
self-fulfillment of Spirit. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart 
[that is the disinterested, the wholehearted, the loving] 
for they shall see God.” “If a man say, I love God, and 
hateth his brother he is a liar: for he that loveth not his 
brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom he 
hath not seen.” (I John iv: 20.) 

The Godward impulse of the human soul is the impulse 
toward unity and harmony of spirit and will, towards 
inner peace and social peace through worship of the Per- 
fect and service of the Perfect by its increasing realiza- 
tion in the life of humanity. 


APOTHEOSIS AND INCARNATION 189 


No thinking man who surveys the ills and confusions 
in the individual life and society to-day can doubt that 
what we need is more light and love; or, rather, love 
lighted up by intelligence until it becomes a transforming 
and regenerating power which will sweep away all the 
phobias and suppressed complexes, personal, social and 
international, which hinder the progress of humanity 
towards the universal fulfillment of the goal of person- 
ality. Knowledge is not enough. It must be warmed and 
impelled by that love of man which can see the lineaments 
of God even shining through man’s ignorances and fears; 
the love which serves man because it adores the Perfect 
One in Whose image he is made, But love alone is not 
enough. It must be guided by intelligence, free and open, 
facing and relentlessly probing every fact, however sordid 
or hideous, in order that by the light of love, applied 
intelligently, the causes of fear and maimed lives, of 
thwarted personalities and social disease may be removed, 
that man may become a finer expression of the Creative 
Thought of God, the Logos. 

The Godward impulse will not die out. The leadership 
of Christ will not cease. As long as man lives he must 
ever seek to pass beyond what he is and has been, must 
lose his soul in order to gain it, must die to live. And 
God in Christ is for man, in whatsoever guise man may 
depict God, the Embodiment, the Ever Present Being, of 
that far country of the Spirit. God in Christ is the Per- 
fection, the Home, of all the spiritual values which we 
human beings must needs worship—in communion with 
Whose perfection is our peace and our salvation. 


CHAPTER XV 
CREEDS AS SPIRITUAL SYMBOLS 


For the purpose of this discussion we shall take account 
only of the two great historical creeds which are common 
to orthodox Christendom—the Apostles’ and the Nicene. 
It is, of course well-known that the Apostles’ Creed was 
not framed by the apostles. It quite obviously grew up 
as a simple statement of the elements of Christianity as 
a historic faith emanating from Jesus. In its present 
form it is later than the Nicene Creed. In the West it 
is traced back to the old Roman Creed of the second cen- 
tury which contains no reference to the descent into hell 
or the communion of saints. These clauses do not appear 
in the creeds of this type earlier than in the fifth century. 
Tertullian (160-240) and Marcion (144) both give the 
substance of creeds in which the virgin birth is mentioned. 

The Nicene Creed was not, in its present form, adopted 
by the Council of Nicea. It is the result of a gradual 
growth due to the doctrinal controversies in regard to the 
natures and relative positions of God the Father, God the 
Son and God the Holy Ghost; and especially designed to 
guard against Arianism, which would make Christ a 
lower Divine Being than God. Arianism held that Christ 
is a perfect moral being who is raised into moral unity 
with the Father. The creed of the Nicene Council 
affirmed the uncreated nature of Jesus Christ and the 

160 


CREEDS AS SPIRITUAL SYMBOLS 161 


identity of his divine substance with that of the Father. 
The Nicene Creed, almost in its present form, was adopted 
by the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451. But the pro- 
cession of the Holy Ghost “from the Son” as well as from 
the Father—was added later, probably by copyists. 

Neither the creed of the Nicene Council nor the creed 
of Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis, which apparently was 
the basis of the creed cited at the Council of Constanti- 
nople in A.D. 381, made reference to the Virgin Birth 
or the descent into hell. The creed of Epiphanius is by 
many scholars regarded as a revision of the Jerusalem 
cereed—the chief addition being “‘that is, of the substance 
of the Father,” after the words “begotten of his Father 
before all the worlds.” Some scholars argue that Epi- 
phanius wrote down the original creed of the Council 
of Nicwa and that the additions are interpolations of 
copyists. The texts cited at the second session of the 
Council and at the sixth session vary. The true form of 
the text cited at Constantinople is not known for certain. 
The procession of the Holy Spirit “from the Son” was a 
later interpolation of copyists. This addition was the 
chief doctrinal cause of the split between the Eastern and 
Western churches, being imposed on the church chiefly by 
the authority of Charlemagne. 

In sum, both creeds were the result of gradual growth 
and accretion due to many causes. The victory of the 
Nicene Creed at Niceea over the semi-Arian creeds was 
the unexpected victory of a minority with strong convic- 
tions. Neither creed can be regarded as having been 
affirmed once and for all in all its features by an undivided 
Christendom at a truly ecumenical council as a confession 
of faith binding on all faithful Christians. 


162 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


The purpose of the Nicene Creed was to affirm that 
God was verily incarnated in the historic person, Jesus, 
the Christ—that being truly man he was nevertheless 
veritably divine—neither a being of different though 
similar nature to God nor the mere semblance of a man. 
Against Gnosticism the Nicene Creed affirms the Oneness 
of God and the identity of the Creator with the God in- 
carnate in Jesus. Against Docetism it affirms the true 
humanity and distinctive personality of Jesus Christ. It 
further affirms the identity of the Holy Spirit, as the con- 
tinuing manifestation of God’s teaching and sanctifying 
power in the world, with the spirit of Christ. 

The Nicene Creed guarded the faith against the ex- 
treme dualism of Gnostics and Manicheans. It guarded 
the faith against that docetic doctrine which would have 
undermined the basic principle of faith; that the ethical 
and spiritual work of Jesus as a human being is rooted 
and grounded in the Supreme Being. 

The creeds thus rendered a service of inestimable value. 
It is querulous faultfinding to criticize the Nicene Creed 
for being too philosophical or metaphysical. It was neces- 
sary, when the simple Christian faith was taken up by 
people of Greek culture, that the faith should be stated 
in terms of Greek philosophical thought. 

The creeds share in the greatness and the limitations 
of ancient thought. They presuppose the Ptolemaic, or 
geocentric conception of the universe. ‘He descended 
into hell” presupposes that hell is a place of departed 
spirits situated below the surface of the flat earth. ‘He 
ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of 
God” presupposes that heaven is a place situated above 
the earth somewhere in the starry firmament. He “was 


CREEDS AS SPIRITUAL SYMBOLS 163 


born of the Virgin Mary” presupposes that, because of 
the innate depravity of the human race which is trans- 
mitted through sexual generation, a sinless Redeemer must 
have been incarnated in some other way than by sexual 
reproduction. ‘The moral miracle of Jesus’ sinlessness 
is taken to presuppose his immaculate conception by the 
Virgin. 

No one of these conceptions can be accepted as neces- 
sarily implied in the spiritual uniqueness of Jesus by the 
mind imbued with the spirit of modern science. They 
are physical symbols of spiritual truths. Nay, we must 
go farther and say that while the doctrine that Jesus is 
of the same substance with the Father, but is a different 
Divine Person, is a metaphysical symbol of a spiritual 
truth—namely that for those who are quickened by faith 
in Jesus Christ the ethical and spiritual values of the 
Mind of Christ are of supreme authority and therefore 
must have a Cosmic Source and Support—the symbols 
are imperfect. 

No competent scholar will say that he knows just what 
was meant by the hypostasis, prosopon, persona, the sepa- 
rate personalities of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Cer- 
tainly person cannot have meant what we mean by person; 
otherwise we should have the creeds affirming at once one 
God and three Gods. . 

The doctrine of the triune God is a hint thrown out at 
a great mystery. It is a way of affirming the richness 
of God’s being as a spiritual Community of Life and Love, 
a self-manifesting Spirit, supreme Creator and Lover, 
continuously immanent in his creation, showing himself 
forth in ever-ascending degrees of perfection as Power 
and Thought, and above all as Love, culminating in his 


164 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


self-revelation in the spirit of Jesus and the continuance 
and growth of that spirit as the Holy Spirit who leads 
and guides men with all truth, who comforts and sancti- 
fies them. 

The doctrine of the triune God is truer than any doc- 
trine which emphasizes the isolated transcendent unity of 
the Godhead. The doctrine of the Trinity makes place 
at once for that reverent agnosticism which leads us to 
confess that God’s ways are not our ways and his thoughts 
are far above us, that He transcends in richness of nature, 
in power of creative thought, all that we can think; and 
for the faith that this world and this human nature are 
truly though but partially manifestations of his being. He 
is immanent in ever-increasing degrees in all finite ener- 
gies, in all forms of life, in man and most fully in Christ 
and Christlike persons. He is a person, but much more 
than a person. He is the Spirit of the Cosmic Com- 
munity in which we have membership, humble though 
it be. 

All our words, even the most refined philosophical terms 
are but symbols. The richer in content and value any 
experience, the more inadequate the symbols. The multi- 
plication table is a symbol of certain precise universal 
and highly abstract and empty forms of thought. Even 
the multiplication table is not adequate for algebra. All 
our scientific concepts are symbolic descriptions—atoms, 
electrons, fields of force, ete. No thoughtful scientist 
thinks the symbols are the realities or even adequate ex- 
pressions for them. When we come to love and friend- 
ship, to beauty, justice, self-sacrifice, how inadequate our 
words! 

How absurd then it is to say, when we are dealing with 


CREEDS AS SPIRITUAL SYMBOLS 165 


a faith that ventures to reach out at the ultimate mystery 
of human existence and the cosmos, “fixity of interpre- 
tation is of the essence of the creeds!’ There can be no 
rigid fixity of interpretation. There has never been any. 
The lovers, mystics and poets alone have right. Faith and 
love will cling to form, but it must not mistake form 
for substance, spirit for letter. 

Those who clamor for fixity of interpretation are with- 
out either historical, poetic or genuine spiritual insight. 

Likewise those who say the creeds deal with facts, not 
theories. How absurd. There is no such thing, as any 
tyro in psychology and theory of knowledge knows, as a 
fact that is not shot through with theory. Even the dis- 
crimination of two adjacent colors in the spectrum or of 
two sounds of neighboring pitch involves theory. All our 
perceptions are impregnated with theory. And the more 
complex in content, the richer in value and meaning our 
so-called facts, the more they are impregnated with theo- 
ries. 

Truth for us consists in the marriage of fact and 
theory; or, in spiritual matters, of experience and imagi- 
native projection. 

In the creeds fact and theory are inseparable. 

A literal interpretation of the elements of Christian 
faith which would place it on a par with the multiplica- 
tion table or the mechanics of a particle would be pos- 
sible only by squeezing out all its spiritual content and 
value. 

These things are hints thrown out at a great mystery. 

We do not know precisely what the framers of the 
Nicene Creed meant. One may well doubt if they them- 
selves knew precisely what they meant. We do know that 


166 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


every intelligent person must abandon any approximation 
to a literal subscription to certain articles of the creeds. 
Even the best scholar cannot be certain of the original 
meanings of other articles. 

Let the creeds stand as symbols of the historic con- 
tinuity of Christian faith and Christian conduct. They 
represent, stretching across the centuries, the contunuity 
of spurit by which we bow before the unequaled moral 
perfection, the flawless and transcendent spiritual beauty 
and power of Christ. We hear the words “Follow me” 
uttered by the Galilean lake. We learn the Sermon on the 
Mount. Here we confess is the highest, holiest, loveliest 
Life that has been revealed to men. Hard it is to follow 
by reason of our selfishness and stupidity. But the hun- 
ger in us for integrity and purity, for love and spiritual 
beauty and harmony goes out to meet that spirit. All 
who are touched by the spirit of Jesus can accept the 
creeds, not as literal and final interpretations in human 
language of that Surpassing Life, but as symbols of the 
continuity and community of the Christlike life. 

This is no time to make new creeds. We should find 
greater difficulty in coming to an agreement than did the 
ancient Christians. This is a day of intellectual and even 
moral confusion and disorder. We have moved in social 
life and thought from unity to multiplicity, as Henry 
Adams puts it. 

With the great variety and richness of our cultural 
and intellectual life, even in any single Christian com- 
munion, we have a great diversity of standpoints, of planes 
of intellectual insight. There are those, and they are the 
majority, for whom the imaginative forms in which the 
spiritual substance of religion is enshrined can be appre- 


CREEDS AS SPIRITUAL SYMBOLS 167 


hended only as literal and concrete verisimilitudes of the 
spiritual values. 

There are those, a small but ever growing minority, for 
whom the pictorial imagery and even the abstract philo- 
sophical conceptions of the creeds have become inadequate 
in their traditional interpretations. But, for all, the 
essential values of the spiritual conception of life en- 
shrined in Christian feeling, faith, and conduct are the 
same. The intellectual minority, imbued with the modern 
scientific spirit and looking at the world and man in 
terms of the modern world-view being built up by physical 
science, biology and psychology and the social studies, 
find their wills and aspirations responsive to the spirit of. 
Jesus, Paul and John. 

Let the ancient creeds then stand and be said and sung 
as historical symbols by which all who are moved and 
quickened in hearts and consciences by the ethics of the 
gospel may express and affirm the essential community 
and continuity of this ethical and religious life with the 
lives of Christian disciples in all ages and under all con- 
ditions of culture. 

The spiritual content of faith must have symbolic forms 
of utterance but the form must vary with the culture of 
the age and the individual. 

The intellectual modernist needs Tennyson’s reminder: 

O thou that after toil and storm 
Mayst seem to have reached a purer alr, 


Whose faith has centre everywhere, 
Nor cares to fix itself to form, 


Leave thou thy sister when she prays, 
Her early Heaven, her happy views; 
Nor thou with shadow’d hint confuse 
A life that leads melodious days. 


168 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


Her faith thro’ form is pure as thine, 
Her hands are quicker unto good; 
O sacred be the flesh and blood 
To which she links a truth divine. 
—Trnnyson, “In Memoriam,’ XXXIII. 


He who has reached the insight that 


Our little systems have their day; 
They have their day and cease to be! 
They are but broken lights of thee, 
And thou, O Lord, art more then they. 


will not stake the validity of the ethical values of religion 
on the use of any special form. He will recognize that 
all are relative to, and all are inevitable in, a phase of 
historical mental culture or of individual cultural devel- 
opment. For such an one can still say with all freedom 
of interpretation: 


Tho’ truths in manhood darkly join, 
Deep seated in our mystic frame, 

We yield all blessing to the name 
Of Him that made them current coin; 


For Wisdom dealt with mortal powers 
Where truth in closest words shall fail, 
When truth embodied in a tale 

Shall enter in at lowly doors 


And so the Word had breath, and wrought 
With human hands the creed of creeds 

In loveliness of perfect deeds, 

More strong than all poetic thought; 


Which he may read that binds the sheaf, 
Or builds the house, or digs the grave 
And those wild eyes that watch the wave 
In roarings round the coral reef. 


CREEDS AS SPIRITUAL SYMBOLS 169 


For learned and unlearned alike, for him who thinks in 
simple images, as for him who thinks in the highest scien- 
tific concepts, this faith remains. 


Strong Son of God, immortal Love 
Whom we that have not seen thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone embrace 
Believing where we cannot prove 


Thou seemest human and divine, 

The highest, holiest manhood, thou: 

Our wills are ours, we know not how 
Our wills are ours, to make them thine. 


And so all can pray 


O living will that shalt endure. 

When all that seems shall suffer shock, 
Rise in the spiritual rock 

Flow thro’ our deeds and make them pure. 





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CHAPTER XVI 
A CRITERION FOR THE EVALUATION OF RELIGIONS 


The defenders of the absolute integrity and authority 
of Christian tradition are wont to contend that orthodox 
Christianity is a religion based on solid and incontro- 
vertible historical facts; that it is a religion whose genesis 
and completion as the exclusive Divine Revelation of the 
career, vocation and destiny of man are to be found in 
certain historical events which must be accepted as the 
sole direct acts of God; whereas all other religions, ethical 
systems and philosophies are but man made. Thus the 
Christian religion, the religion founded on the solid facts 
of the one process of Divine Revelation and the One 
Unique Incarnation of God, is contrasted with the relig- 
ions of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Persia and India, which 
were the products of man’s aberrant fancy, working alone 
in the darkness without Divine aid; and with all the secu- 
lar philosophies which are the products of merely human 
speculation. The rock on which Christian belief and 
doctrine is built is the solid rock of historical fact. It 
was given once for all in the veritable and exclusive trans- 
actions of God with mankind through certain chosen indi- 
viduals of a chosen race. Here it is! Take it or leave it 
at your peril! Take it and be saved; reject it and be 
damned. 

The traditionalist is a very naif person. He accepts 

173 


174 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


an ancient philosophy of history and a congruous cos- 
mology or philosophy of nature, but he affirms them to be 
not theory or doctrine but fact. Like M. Jourdain, who 
lived for forty years before he discovered that he had 
always talked prose, the traditionalist does not know that 
he offers an imaginative and philosophical epic as fact. 
He is unaware that his history is shot through with inter- 
pretations in terms of certain values which he cherishes 
and clothes in poetic symbols; in short, that his whole 
history is a poetic philosophy of history which includes 
a cosmology or theory of the universe. I shall proceed to 
show that Christianity is indeed a historical religion, but 
not in the naif way in which the traditionalist supposes 
it to be. 

Let us waive the disagreements between Greek Catho- 
lics, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists 
and the numerous Protestant sects, in regard to the true 
content of tradition. Let us waive the divergencies as 
to what the sacred tradition of history includes, in order 
to reduce the problem to its simplest terms. We will 
begin with the canonical books of the Bible as our start- 
ing point (waiving the divergence between Protestants 
and Roman Catholics in regard to the Apocryphal books) 
and we will stop with St. Augustine, who gave a classical 
formulation of the Christian philosophy of history. What 
have we between these limits? Certainly not a succes- 
sion of uncolored and indubitable facts, but a noble and 
imposing philosophy of history implying a philosophy of 
nature. 

Just when this philosophy of history began to be 
framed, we do not know. Its first clear expression is the 
write-up of Hebrew and world history in the reign of 


——— 


a ee ee ee ee 


ee a a a ee ge 


ee ee Se a ee ee 





Se a a 


THE EVALUATION OF RELIGIONS 175 


King Josiah in connection with the centralization of wor- 
ship at Jerusalem. The Elohistic and Jahvistic stories 
of creation and of the history of the chosen people are 
woven together. Moses is represented as the author of 
the Deuteronomic Code. Later, under Ezra, there was 
another revision—the so-called Priestly Code. Thus was 
established the background for the specifically Christian 
philosophy of history. As a minimum the latter includes 
—the special creation by fiat in six days; the fall and 
expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden; 
the consequent sins, disorders and wanderings of the hu- 
man race; the destruction by the flood; the emergence of 
the Hebrews with a mythical ancestor Abraham; the 
special acts of God in his dealings with Jacob, Moses, the 
judges, kings, prophets and priests; finally, the sending 
of his only Son as the Messiah to redeem his chosen people 
and other peoples through Israel; the rejection of the 
Messiah; the atoning death of God’s only Son; after he 
had established a church and ordinances and appointed 
overseers and provided for the manner of their succession ; 
the continuance of the dispensation of the instruments of 
grace through the divinely established institution—the 
Church, outside of which there is no salvation. Logically, 
there follows the claim of the supremacy of the Church 
over all other human institutions, since to it alone is en- 
trusted the supreme interest of man—the salvation of his 
soul, 

Augustine, in his City of God, brought the Christian 
philosophy of history to its culminating and most grandi- 
ose expression. It implies that when the number of the 
elect is completed God will bring the present world to a 
sudden end. 


176 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


This is the first notable moralistic philosophy of his- 
tory. It involves the conception of nature as the pliant 
tool of a transcendent Deity, who created the world pri- 
marily as a habitation for man; but who employs natural 
forces as instruments to punish, chasten and instruct man 
in obedience to the Divine Will. Nature is merely God’s 
set of instruments which He has made for nurturing and 
training man. He is above and beyond it. The natural 
universe is small, geocentric and of short duration. God 
suspends or alters the modes of operation of natural forces 
at his good pleasure. Men, especially chosen by Him, can 
do the same. The heathen have not known God, because 
He has not chosen to reveal Himself to them. (There 
are, of course, some exceptions to this view recognized by 
some of the early Christian writers who had been impreg- 
nated with Greek culture.) 

The heathen world is sunk in ignorance, error and sin. 
The virtues of the heathen are but splendid vices; al- 
though Paul, Augustine and other Christian writers 
admit that the heathen are not devoid of knowledge and 
virtue. 

This is not history, but a philosophy of history based 
on a moralistic interpretation of a period of religious 
development. In it factual events and interpretations are 
blended into a whole asserted to be entirely factual. It 
is not physics but a philosophy of nature. And the phi- 
losophy of history and of nature dovetail beautifully to- 
gether. 

Slowly but steadily, modern thought * has laid the foun- 


1f mean by ‘‘modern thought’’ modern science and philosophy 
since the sixteenth century. The first great moderns are Francis 
Bacon, Bruno, and Copernicus. 





THE EVALUATION OF RELIGIONS 177 


dations of another philosophy of nature and another 
philosophy of history. The physical universe is a self- 
contained whole, of very long duration, marvelously com- 
plex in its structure, boundless in extent, and everywhere 
manifesting regular modes of behavior. The same kinds 
of forces that operate in it now have always operated and 
in the same manner. The ‘uniformity of nature’ really 
means the continuity throughout all time of the same 
kinds of causes. The universe is whole and seamless. All 
its individual constituents, from the electron and man to 
the remotest star, are elements in one universal order. 
The universe is not dead matter. It is dynamic, alive, 
creative. Neither is it disembodied spirit. If God there 
be, he must be the universal activating or creative Prin- 
ciple of Order, the Ground of all the countless and cease- 
less energies, lives, minds in the hving cosmos. He can- 
not be a Cosmic Artificer, dwelling outside the universe, 
modeling and remodeling it here and there, now and then. 
Either He works in the universe all the time or He does 
nothing and is nonexistent. 

The cosmology of modern science implies a new phi- 
losophy of history. The human race emerges from the 
womb of nature. It is but one, although a unique mani- 
festation of the cosmic creative energy. Therefore, the 
whole human race, throughout all its history, has been 
shaping and reshaping, and largely without clear con- 
sciousness either of its own aims or the means for their 
achievement, its cultures; its moral systems; its religious 
rites and symbols; its sciences, arts and philosophies; all 
as ways of better realizing, by new adaptations and inven- 
tions, zts fundamental urge for more life and fuller. No 
moral system, no religion, no art, no social order devel- 


178 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


oped by man, is an invention prompted by the Devil. No 
one is to be despised and none is absolutely final. 

If there be a Universal Spirit, one working in and 
through the human spirit, then in ancient far-off China 
something of that Spirit was realized through Confucius; 
through Lao-T'st with his doctrine of Tao or Universal 
Order, Quietness and Harmony; and through Méh-Ti 
with his positive golden rule. Then the Vedantic doc- 
trine of the identity of the individual soul with the World- 
Soul is a discovery of one aspect of the total and universal 
meaning of existence. The pantheism of Akhnaton, the 
moral idealism of Plato, the mystic fervor of Plotinus, 
the great compassion of Buddha—are all contributions to 
the universal spiritual development of the race. 

Modern science and our new civilization, which is still 
in the making, cannot be the tragic errors that some wor- 
shipers of the Middle Ages would have us believe. ‘They 
represent our efforts to realize more life and fuller. 

Thus we substitute, for the particularistic and pater- 
nalistic philosophy of history of the traditionalist, a un- 
versalistic philosophy of history, which sees in every 
culture, in every religion, a note in the vast diapason of 
universal humanity ; of man realizing as best he can, under 
every clime and in every culture, the good life. 

We do not exclude from the divine value and meaning 
of life all but a few thousand years of cultural life played 
out on the narrow areas of Western Asia Minor, Europe 
and America. We recognize in principle that, if there be 
any meaning, any value, any good in human life; every 
culture, in every epoch, in every clime, is a note in the 
universal orchestration of the Spirit. Either the Uni- 
versal Spirit is immanent in the whole life of humanity, 





THE EVALUATION OF RELIGIONS 179 


which life, in turn, is a special individuation of conscious 
existence emerging from the bosom of the Cosmos; or 
there is no meaning at all in human history. 

We reject the dualistic cosmology of traditionalism and 
we reject its parochial and exclusivistic philosophy of 
history. No longer, in the presence of what we have 
learned from science in regard to the constitution, struc- 
ture, history and behavior of nature, can we admit a 
geocentric and dualistic cosmology; in which nature is 
nothing but the football of a Transcendent Spirit, who 
creates it out of nothing and who kicks it about to satisfy 
his inscrutable desires. 

No longer, in the presence of our widened horizons, our 
knowledge of the great variety of human cultures and 
our lengthened historical perspective, going back to the 
old stone age, can we admit that the Cosmic Spirit, after 
Adam’s fall, confined his intercourse with man to a small 
semibarbaric people on the fringe of the coastland of 
hither Asia. We must, in the lght of our historical 
knowledge, reject this unhistorical philosophy of history. 
It is not a neutral statement of facts. It is a moralistic 
and pietistic epical representation, containing a modicum 
of fact but motivated by spiritual values. 

No longer can we admit that, a priori, every new theory 
discovered by science, every new area of significant cul- 
ture revealed by comparative history and ethnology, must 
either square with the traditional philosophy of history 
and cosmology, or be rejected as inventions of heretics 
and evil doers inspired by the Satanic spirit of him who 
ever denies. 

We have reached the point where the question no longer 
is this—Can these modern discoveries, these enlarged 


180 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


horizons of our culture, be reconciled with our own re- 
ligious tradition, but this—What is there left of our 
religious tradition, these things being admitted as true? 

Well, what is left? Jesus, the Divine Dreamer and 
consummate Artist in the Spiritual Order; Jesus the 
transcendently beautiful figure, a Life Giver, a Lover of 
his kind even unto death? Paul, a noble Pharisee on 
fire with consuming zeal to spread the gospel of spiritual 
liberty, of universal love, of the supremacy of the spiritual 
mind over the lusts and hates of the flesh. John, the 
mystic poet, philosopher of love. 

After them, great thinkers like Origen and Augustine, 
the mystics, St. Francis, and all the noble company of 
lovers of man, of nature and of God. 

No longer shall we measure spiritual greatness by the 
yardstick made by combining Hebrew cosmology and phi- 
losophy of history with an infusion of Greek metaphysics. 

We shall welcome whatever can stand the clear light 
of modern thought, as a precious stone to be set in the 
great building of the spiritual temple of Humanity. But 
we shall distinguish between the respective values of the 
various ethical and spiritual insights as contributions to 
the upbuilding of a finer humanity. And our criterion 
is this—the harmonious wmtegration of the capacities of 
human nature vnto a concrete living unity of action and 
feeling; in short, the harmonious realization and enjoy- 
ment of full personality by man. No fundamental capac- 
Jesus, even though he were a purely symbolic figure created by the 
imagination to be the personified center and bearer of spiritual 
values. Indeed, one must admit that the Christ, in distinction from 
Jesus of Nazareth, is largely the poetic personification of spiritual 


values—an ideal figure unconsciously created by the spiritual imagi- 
nation. 


| 
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THE EVALUATION OF RELIGIONS 181 


ity of human nature is to be denied self-expression. But 
no one shall be exclusively affirmed at the expense of 
others. Each in its due time and measure, the native 
impulses of human nature must take their places and 
perform their functions in a erarchical harmony— 
lowest, the sensuous impulses concerned with physical 
self-preservation; higher, as embodying the life of the 
species and containing the germs of sociality, the procre- 
ative impulses; higher still, the impulses that flower in 
creative workmanship, the enjoyment and creation of 
beauty, the discovery and enjoyment of truth, the growth 
of social codperation and communal fellowship; and 
finally, crowning all, the positive sense of the harmony 
of our being with the Universal Life—Communion with 
the Divine Meaning of the whole. 

Mankind, in all its varied forms of culture; in its arts, 
its knowledges, it religions and philosophies; has ever 
been seeking the fruition of personality, in communion of 
self with self and of self with the Universal Spirit. 

Whatsoever is of any value, as contributing to the ful- 
fillment of spiritual individuality or personality, is to be 
recognized. When the Brahmanist, in the Upanishads, 
reiterates the identity of the individual soul with the 
world soul, that is a one-sided expression of the truth that 
the Highest Human is nearest the Divine. When the 
ancient Taoist affirmed the good life as one of peace, gen- 
tleness, absence of noisy self-assertion and ambition, the 
cessation of desire; because thereby one became harmoni- 
ous with the cosmic Tao, Law or Order; which does not 
haste or strive but silently and eternally originates, em- 
braces and sustains all things; here, too, we have a one- 
sided expression of the principle that true personality is 


182 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


won, not through egotistical self-assertion, but by seeking 
oneness with the universal order. 

Indeed, the study of comparative religion and ethics 
reveals a striking agreement in regard to the moral values 
stressed in all the religions of highly cultivated peoples. 
To the ancient Greeks we owe most of our concepts in 
social ethics. To Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics we are 
indebted for the original impetus to form good working 
notions of justice, wisdom, courage, temperance, social 
rights and duties. To the Romans we owe the founda- 
tions of the science of law or jurisprudence. To the Stoics 
we owe the first conception of a universal social ethics, a 
universal brotherhood of man and a universal Divine 
Fatherhood. The Stoic idea of God was really the doc- 
trine of Heraclitus that the world-process is pervaded and 
controlled by a Universal Order or Reason—the Logos. 
The Stoics gave to this concept a warmer, more spiritual, 
more personalized quality of being. The Stoics dealt with 
the problem of the reconciliation of evil with the Divine 
Goodness, much as do idealistic theologians and philoso- 
phers to-day. 

Philosophical Brahmanism, as we have seen, teaches 
the identity of all souls in the Universal Soul—Brahma. 
It bases on this teaching love for one’s neighbor. One’s 
neighbor is in truth one’s very self. It insists on chastity, 
temperance, gentleness, forgiveness. Primitive Buddhism 
forbids the taking of life, stealing, unchastity, lying, the 
use of intoxicating liquors. In addition to these com- 
mands, binding alike on laymen and monks, it enjoins on 
its monks celibacy, simplicity, even poverty of life. Its 
moral teachings are simple and lofty; based on the prin- 
ciple of universal love or compassion for all living crea- 





THE EVALUATION OF RELIGIONS 183 


tures. It offers as the reward in the present life the at- 
tainment of a calm and serene mind, one freed from all 
the storms of passion and desire, and therefore from 
sorrow; and in the future either a more favorable rebirth 
or eternal blessedness in Nirvana. Like Jesus, Siddartha, 
that is, Gotama Buddha, insisted on purity of inward 
motive. But Buddhism did not emphasize the value of 
positive social service so strongly as did early Chris- 
tianity. 

Summing up, it can be said that the elementary moral 
content of all the higher religions is much the same. 
Speaking the truth and the keeping of contracts; chastity ; 
temperance and self-control; courage; justice; loyalty to 
one’s kindred, friends and country; reverence—all these 
values are recognized in all the higher religions. 

So, too, with the more spiritual values—calmness and 
serenity of mind; fidelity to duty; love and forgiveness ; 
the recognition of a universal community of spirit in 
humanity—all these values are, in some degree and man- 
ner, recognized and stressed alike by Vedantist, Buddhist, 
Platonist and Stoic, as well as by the Christian.° 

In truth, the main stream of ancient Christianity, be- 
fore its division by the great schism, was formed by the 
confluence of many rivers. The immediate spiritual 
background of Jesus, is, of course, the marvelous pro- 
phetic movement which began in the eighth century B.C. 
with Amos, Hosea, Micah and the first Isaiah, and which 
continued through Jeremiah and the second Isaiah. 
There God is conceived, perhaps for the first time in world 
history, as one supreme Ethical and Personal Spirit whose 


3 Compare W. K. Wright, A Student’s Philosophy of Religion, pp. 
73, 74, 78-80, 91-95, 105-107, 112-119, 126-128, 208-212. 


184 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


true service consists in the practice of self-control, moral 
integrity, social justice and mercy. Jesus completed the 
prophetic movement. This movement implicitly con- 
tained the principle of ethical and religious universalism. 
The second great confluent was the Stoic ethics and 
theology which entered Christianity through Paul. He 
was reared in Tarsus, at whose University Stoicism was 
regnant. The Pauline doctrines of body, soul and spirit; 
the Pauline distinction between the various kinds of 
bodies (terrestrial and celestial, natural and spiritual) ; 
the Pauline contrast between the ruling part, spirit or 
reason, in the soul and the lusts of the flesh; the Pauline 
conception of the Spirit of God as immanent in nature and 
man (“Though he be not far from every one of us, For in 
him we live and move and have our being,”’ Acts xvii: 27, 
28); the very fundamental thought that God as spirit is 
at once One and Transcendent and Many and Immanent, 
manifest throughout nature and in higher degree in the 
hearts or consciences of men—all these notions are Stoic. 
The last one is also Neo-Platonic. The Logos doctrine is 
at once Stoic and Neo-Platonic. So the third contribut- 
ing stream in Christianity is the Neo-Platonic. Neo- 
Platonism, as it developed into a great religious philoso- 
phy, laid stress upon the purely spiritual or immaterial 
nature of God, on the immateriality of the spiritual and 
ethical part in the human soul, on the mystical union 
with the Godhead as the supreme Good. The Logos or 
Word is Platonic-Stoic in the Gospel of John. The 
marked affinity between Neo-Platonism and Christianity 
is evident in the community of thought of Origen, the 
great Christian Platonist of Alexandria, and his friend 
Plotinus, the greatest of the heathen Neo-Platonists. Both 


— 
aye a ee 


a a 


THE EVALUATION OF RELIGIONS 185 


developed the Platonic philosophy in the direction of a 
spiritual and mystical theology. Their fundamental 
divergence, of course, consists in that Origen identifies 
the historical Jesus with the full incarnation of God—the 
Logos. The influence of Neo-Platonism is very marked 
in the case of Augustine. It continues through Boethius, 
John Scotus Erigena, the Mystics and Dante. 

Another tributary to Christianity was Roman social 
organization and statescraft, which exercised in time a 
reflex influence on the conception of God and salvation. 
The authoritative imperialism of the Roman Empire be- 
came the model for Catholic Christendom. It tended to 
make sacrosanct and to petrify into an unyielding struc- 
ture all the elements drawn into the making of Chris- 
tianity. 

It is very noteworthy, as I have said, that all the relig- 
ions of the higher cultures agreed in general terms in 
their emphasis on certain basic or practical moral virtues. 
Common to all is the affirmation of faith in the supremacy 
of those inward qualities of spirit which find expression 
in temperance, self-control, honesty and integrity, forgive- 
ness, and sympathy; and faith in the harmony between 
these virtues and the ruling Powers in the cosmos. Where 
the divergences begin and the distinctions become impor- 
tant are with these finer nuances of spiritual value, which 
issue forth from the doctrine of personality or moral indt- 
viduality, from conceptions of its true nature and its place 
in the universal whole. 

All the nobler Oriental religious insights—those of the 
Upanishads, of primitive Buddhism, of Taoism—are de- 
fective at this point. And even the lofty and intellectual 
mysticism of Neo-Platonism is defective at the same point, 


186 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


The quest for inner peace, for subjection of passion, for 
freedom and serenity of soul, by union with the Universal 
Spirit, is carried to the point where individuality or per- 
sonality tends to vanish wholly in an Impersonal Abso- 
lute. Such a religious doctrine cannot be the source of 
a vigorous social ethics. 

For, since a just, harmonious and vigorous social order 
is one constituted by the codperative fellowship and com- 
munion of vigorous self-determining individuals, where 
the negative moment in the development of ethical per- 
sonality is overstressed at the expense of the affirmative 
moment, the social order must sicken and wither. Where 
there is no hope for the individual there can be none for 
society. A vigorous social order will not be made up of 
world-weary negativistic persons. It is precisely in Hel- 
lenized Christianity alone that one finds the harmonious 
balance and interplay of the ethical principles of individu- 
ality and community. Herein lies the ethical supremacy 
of Jesus and his followers. For Him the individual has 
absolute value. God has created and cares for the indi- 
vidual. Everything in nature and social culture is to 
be tested by its influence in the making of spiritual 
individuals or persons. On the other hand, personality 
is developed and enjoyed only in codperation, communion 
and fellowship. 

Thus Christianity represents the high-water mark of 
ethical and spiritual insight. It was a happy conjunction, 
in no way derogating from the supreme value of the Chris- 
tian spiritual impetus, that the work of Jesus and Paul 
found a cultivated soil at hand in the preparation already 
made by the spiritual genius of Plato, Aristotle and the 
Stoics. In terms of Ethics, one may say that Plato and 


THE EVALUATION OF RELIGIONS 187 


Aristotle laid the foundations of a rational theory of 
social ethics; one in which the individual is the center and 
community the area of the circle; or, in a better figure, 
the individual and community are the two poles of the 
one spiritual whole. The Stoics universalized the ethical 
concepts of Plato and Aristotle and the soil was ready 
for the fertilizing impulse of Christianity. 

The permanent value of this great synthesis of Greek 
thought with the dynamic of Jesus’ personality, achieved 
through Paul and his successors, is in no way lessened 
when we have recognized that the traditional philosophy 
of history and nature must be discarded. 

For it remains true that there are great creative flow- 
ering times in the life of the spirit, as in the life of nature. 
When our minds are freed from slavish thraldom to the 
letter of the past we can use more freely and effectively 
the great insights and the great dynamic impulses which, 
coming down the stream of time, clarify our notions, 
quicken our spirits, give use hope and courage and faith 
to make our own lives and the community life, so far as 
we may, vessels for the realization of harmonious and 
integral personality in communion and fellowship. 

For we, to-day, are threatened by quite another danger 
than the extinction of the individuality of the soul by its 
disappearance into the void of an impersonal absolute. 
We are not endangered by quietism, world-weariness and 
negativism in their Oriental forms. 

We are threatened by what is perhaps a more ominous 
danger—the swallowing up of all genuine spiritual indi- 
viduality; the extinction of human psychical wealth and 
diversity of experience, expression and joy; by the 
mechanization of human society. We are threatened with 


188 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


the loss of the sources of inner joy, the extinction of the 
impulses to vigorous self-expression; to creation; to ad- 
venture in the realms of art, literature, play, culture— 
as well as in everyday work—by the overorganization 
and standardization of life. Everywhere, quantity produc- 
tion through vast organizations, to turn out cheap and 
mediocre standardized” products rules our lives. “The 
individual withers and the world is more and more;” 
and “the world” here means a herd of machine-made men 
and women serving machines. Mechanization of person- 
ality for quantity production—there ws the enemy. 

I think the decline of individuality is manifest in art, 
letters, general culture, as it is in all industrial activity. 
It is certainly manifest in my own field of higher educa- 
tion. American higher education is becoming mechanized 
from bottom to top. 

Now, a vast mechanized social organization will not 
carry on without individuality to rule and run it. But 
what kind of individuality? Where is the pressure 
exerted and in what direction? To subordinate every- 
thing full, creative, individual in the spiritual realm, to 
industrial and commercial machinery, to enthrone com- 
mercial magnates and industrial managers, advertisers 
and salesmen as our rulers? Everything must be sold. 
Can we “sell” personality? Plato and Christ are at one 
in furnishing us with insights, values and impulses to 
overcome this engulfing tide which threatens to drown all 
individuality, distinction, fineness and freedom. Plato 
says that virtue or the good is supreme in the universe 
and virtue is the “harmony of the soul’; Jesus says ‘““What 
shall a man give in exchange for his soul?’ In the mod- 
ern phrase, what are we “selling’’—beauty, joy, freedom, 


eS —_= 


a 
es =~ 
en ee ee eee ee ee ee 


THE EVALUATION OF RELIGIONS 189 


harmony, creativeness and the fellowship of noble 
minds ¢ 

And now we are ready to state the criterion of religious 
value, in terms of the function of religion. 

1. This function is bipolar. Religion enfranchises 
and enriches human individuality. By bringing him in 
touch with the Infinite Life, it frees man from the bondage 
of mere routine, of habit and mechanization—in thought, 
feeling, and action. It gives a new dimension to indi- 
viduality. We are all constantly in danger that the 
springs of our spiritual life—of feeling, thought and voli- 
tion—shall dry up. We tend to peter out, to run in 
grooves, to repeat the same old thoughts, to cherish the 
same old feelings. We live for the most part as psychical 
mechanisms. But not wholly so. And we rebel rightly 
against becoming mere machines. We seek fresh inspira- 
tions. This means that we wish to get out of the tread- 
mill of a work-a-day mechanical existence. Religion liber- 
ates us. For through it we enter into living and immedi- 
ate converse with the Universal Fountain of Life which 
is supermechanical, supernatural, superhuman. The very 
essence of religion is that in it the individual feels directly 
his contact with the Creative Source of Life and Power. 
Religious experience is the agency which recharges the 
run-down batteries of human individuality. If one take 
“Nature” as meaning a routine order of behavior of things 
on a flat plane of mechanism, with no inrush of creative 
power, then the very essence of religion is supernatural. 

2. An equally insistent characteristic of religion is that 
it is communal. It breaks down the barriers between 
individuals. For what sets up these barriers is just 
mechanization—is just that habituation of thought and 


199 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


feeling, by which the individual identifies himself wholly 
with his own routine ways and interests or with the rou- 
tine of some group: it may be a labor group, a capitalistic 
group, a professional group, a political group, or even a 
nationalistic group. Religion is the only antidote for 
the bad individualism which is self-minded, group- 
minded, or class-minded, and thus far unsocial; which can- 
not see over or through its own backyard fences of self, 
family or group. This bad individualism and “group- 
ism” spells social disintegration. It becomes the more 
potent and dangerous, the more highly concentrated and 
specialized men’s interests and activities become. 

Religion breaks down these fences. It penetrates the 
barriers. It reveals the falsity of an individualism in 
which one is shut up within one’s own psychical skin. It 
shows that the supposed impenetrability of selfhood is 
nought but the impenetrability of ossified habit mechan- 
isms. Religion is essentially communal-mindedness. 
Everywhere and always, through common worship, it 
stresses the sense of fellowship, of communion, of values 
and purposes shared among selves. Individualism spells 
the depotentialization of individuality. True individu- 
ality flourishes only where there is community of purpose, 
aim and faith. And the wider reaching and deeper go- 
ing this community, the richer the individualities it 
develops. 

3. The bipolar function of religion—the liberation and 
repotentializing of individuality and the socialization of 
purposes, aims and values, can be performed only if there 
be a supermechanical, supernatural and supersocial In- 
finite Source of spiritual energies, Infinite Ground of 
Values—What men commonly call God. 


eS a ee le 


THE EVALUATION OF RELIGIONS 191 


The individual who worships himself or his groups, is 
dying, intellectually, esthetically, morally—every way. 
To set up the worship and service even of the most gen- 
erous and general social values as the object of religion; 
to put “social values” in place of God seems a way out 
for those who wish to keep something of the august aura 
of religion but, by reason of the apparent strength of 
positivism and agnosticism, have given up all hope of a 
knowledge of Reality. This way out is a will-o’-the-wisp. 
Either ‘Ideal Social Values” is a very abstract and round- 
about way of translating God, the Absolute Reality, into 
practical pragmatic terms, or it is a vain and empty 
notion. Does one mean by the worship and service of 
social values just the adoration of the sum total of values 
that human beings actually enjoy or pursue? Then one 
is worshiping an abstraction. If one cannot well wor- 
ship one’s own imperfect self and draw spiritual suste- 
nance therefrom, how can one worship the sum total of 
human selves? One may grant that this attitude is, ethi- 
cally, a vastly higher and more religious attitude than the 
worship of oneself in one’s group. But to take this seri- 
ously implies that the life of humanity is grounded in an 
Absolute Source of Life and Value which transcends 
human society. 

The spiritual health of society can only be improved 
if there really be a doctor who knows its diseases and can 
supply the remedies. The possibility of social regenera- 
tion and individual redemption, through and in the proc- 
ess of social regeneration, rests on the reality of a super- 
natural and supersocial Source of the good life. God 
must exist as the Supreme Reality, the Inexhaustible 
Spring of spiritual energy. In reverent communion with 


192 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


Him the individual and the community gain refreshment 
and new power. 

The best argument for the reality of God is, after all, 
the fact that man, who has endured and flourished on 
this planet, 1s never satisfied with the values yielded by 
his own work-a-day mechanisms of individual habits and 
social machinery; but always turns to worship and com- 
mune with the mysterious and ineffable, encompassing 
and sustaining Fountain of Spiritual Life whom men call 
God. 

There is a mystic strain in all of us. It is the deepest 
source of our creative lives. Without recourse to it we 
cannot live. We needs must worship and contemplate. 
The eye of the soul ever seeks farther horizons. 

The mystic is he who has developed farther that spark 
of divine fire that smolders in the common man. The 
mystic can rightly say of those who would limit knowledge 
to sense experience and the deductions of abstract reason 
—“The rest may reason and welcome. ’Tis we musicians 
know.” 

Intuition is a valid form of knowing. It is the imme- 
diate basis of our knowing of other persons, of our 
esthetic knowledge; and it is the solid core of expert judg- 
ment in every field in which the expert or connoisseur 
works. The function of ratiocination is to interpret intui- 
tions, to classify and relate them. There is no more 
ground for denying to the intuitions of the mystic any 
veridical basis in reality than there is for saying that 
the esthetic experiences and the immediate feeling of 
communion with other selves are illusory. On the other 
hand, all intuitions must justify themselves by fitting 
harmoniously into the interpretation of reality as a whole. 





THE EVALUATION OF RELIGIONS 193 


But the mystic’s intuition of the Divine, his sense of com- 
munion with a Reality above the things of sense and be- 
yond the scientist’s abstract skeleton or scheme of reality, 
does not conflict with either sense experience or science. 
It is more inclusive than sense experience and more pal- 
pitating and alive than the scientific conceptual skeleton 
of reality. No data of sense experience and no legitimate 
scientific inference therefrom invalidate the livingness, 
warmth and value of the mystical experience.* 

The danger that besets the mystic is that of flight into, 
and repose in, an abstract void; an empty one that is 
severed from and swallows up in a dark and formless 
night of vague feeling all the concrete differences, all the 
plurality and individuality that make up the concrete 
world of selves. So the mystic is in danger of losing 
his own individuality and the individuality of all other 
beings in an Impersonal Absolute. The God of mystical 
experience, to be of concrete and practical value, must 
be conceived not as denying, but as including and sus- 
taining all the concreteness and plurality of personal 
lives. He must be a God who manifests Himself in other 
experiences and who is the concretely social and living 
Ground of Nature and finite personality.’ 


4Compare the author’s Man and the Cosmos, pp. 549-555. 
5Compare the author’s Man and the Cosmos, Chapters XXX, 
XXXII, and XXXIX, 


CHAPTER XVII 
SCIENCE AND RELIGION 


There are two great types of science: formal and 
empirical. Formal science, which includes logic and pure 
mathematics, is the theory of pure intellectual procedure ; 
in other words, of the universal methods of thought by 
which the truth is attained. Formal science has nothing 
directly to do with the actual facts of the real world. It 
is the theory of the universal principles and procedures to 
which all empirical science must conform. 

Empirical science is the systematic study of facts of 
experience. In every department, empirical science is 
concerned to determine precisely what the facts are and 
how they are connected. The basic procedures of empiri- 
eal science are careful observation and analysis of the 
data, accurate description and generalization from the 
facts. Empirical science results in the formulation of 
laws and explanatory principles. Empirical laws are 
statements of the regular manner of sequence in which 
facts appear. A causal law is a statement of the way in 
which a fact of a specific type follows upon other facts 
of a specific type. In short, a causal law is a statement 
of a certain order of events. This is true whether the 
facts be physical, physiological or psychological, or be a 
compound of all three types. All empirical science aims 
to discover orderly sequences and interdependences among 

194 


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SCIENCE AND RELIGION 195 


facts. Thus, for example, if there be such discoverable 
orderly sequences of historical fact, then, thus far and 
only thus far, history is a science. The predictive value 
of science depends upon the degree in which this order 
ean be formulated as holding for the sequences of 
events. 

Explanatory principles are the great comprehensive 
generalizations which bind large bodies of facts into more 
comprehensive systems. Examples of explanatory prin- 
ciples are: the principle of gravitation; the principle of 
relativity; the electromagnetic theory of light; the elec- 
tronic theory of matter; the evolutionary theory of the 
origin and development of solar systems, of the earth and 
of life. The chief difference between an empirical or 
causal law and an explanatory theory is that the latter 
includes within its sweep many special cases of causal 
order. 

The fundamental postulate of all empirical sciences is 
that, within the special type of fact with which each spe- 
cial science is concerned, there obtain «interdependence 
and regularity. There are no isolated and therefore 
inexplicable facts. An event which was in no way de- 
pendent on other events would be a mtracle. Science has 
no place for miracle in this sense. Further, when a cer- 
tain type of event has been shown to be dependent upon, 
or in some way connected with, another type of event, the 
repetition of the one type will involve the repetition of 
the other type. The causal laws of science are statements 
of the repetition of similar events. 

The goal which beckons science from afar is that of 
weaving into one complete and coherent web of thought 
all the partial causal orders. This goal can, doubtless, 


196 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


never be reached. But it can be more and more closely 
approached. Livery time that a principle of order, a regu- 
lar type of behavior, is found to hold in fields that have 
hitherto seemed separate, one step more is taken towards 
the final goal. This is happening to-day, especially be- 
tween the fields of physics, chemistry and physiology; 
also, to a considerable extent, between the fields of physi- 
ology and psychology. The goal would be attained if we 
could show that all the phenomena of life and mind are 
but special complexes either of physical or of psychical 
events. This goal, of course, is still far distant. Per- 
haps it is unattainable. It may be, as the philosophical 
dualist maintains, that there are two wrreducibly distinct 
types of events—physical and mental—which imply two 
distinct types of existents, bodes and minds. 

Or it may be, as the spiritualist or “mentalist” holds, 
that all bodies are really expressions of minds or souls. 
It is not necessary to prejudge this knotty problem here, 
if it can be shown that religion has a real place, no matter 
whether dualism or spiritualism be true. If materialism, 
the doctrine that everything in the mental or spiritual 
order is a by-product of physical forces were true, religion 
would be an illusion. But materialism is an unprovable 
hypothesis. So is mentalism. 

To sum up the aims and postulates or working hypothe- 
ses of science, science is concerned to determine the se- 
quential dependences of events that are verifiable; that 
are real facts of nature or human nature. Science is 
observation, analysis, precise description, for the purpose 
of arriving at verifiable laws or orders of behavior. In 
so far as science is able to do this, man’s intellectual and 
practical control over nature and human nature is assured. 











SCIENCE AND RELIGION 197 


Science gives man a power of control not otherwise at- 
tainable. 

In the past, owing to the confusion of human motives 
and interests, no clear distinction was drawn between 
scientific control and other forms of control. The primi- 
tive philosophy of Animism, which still persists among 
unscientific people, is the expression of this confusion. 
Not only did it fail to distinguish between different types 
of causation; not only did it jumble together physical, 
biological and mental causation; it further assumed that 
all causation, or nearly all, is the expression of the will 
of animated beings, more or less ike human beings in 
their likes and dislikes, their interests and motives, though 
superior to them in power. As science gradually came 
into being, more and more the volitions of animated be- 
ings were withdrawn as explanations of natural events. 
The sphere of the gods was narrowed. When, in place 
of many gods and spirits, the conception of one God arose, 
the two alternatives which presented themselves were 
these: Is God to be regarded, not as an explanation of 
any special event, since He must be the animating Spirit 
of the Whole, the Supreme Ground of the entire activity, 
life and order of the world, or is He to be placed outside 
of or above the ordinary order of nature and His function 
limited to intervention on special occasions, such as the 
creation of the physical universe, the creation of living 
species, the critical passes in the history of the race or 
of specially favored portions of the human race? The 
latter alternative is a supernaturalistic Dualism. It is 
still held by many intelligent people and is the meta- 
physics which lies behind traditional orthodoxy. A God 
_ who intervenes in a miraculous manner on special occa- 


198 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


sions is the latent presupposition of all doctrines which 
find the basis of religious authority in sacred books or 
institutions and their dogmas. 

The former alternative is entirely consistent with the 
methods and postulates of science; the latter is entirely 
inconsistent therewith, _ 

From the scientific standpoint God is a superfluous 
hypothesis which explains nothing, and only constitutes 
a bar to scientific inquiry. To say that any event is an 
act of God is to close the door to a natural explanation 
of the event. The only notion of God that is in harmony 
with the principles of science is that He is the immanent 
and ceaselessly energizing Ground of the universe and 
that the whole complex and varied order of nature, human 
nature and superhuman nature are manifestations of His 
Kternally Creative Spirit. 

But why should a scientifically minded person be inter- 
ested even in this monistic conception of the relation of 
God to the universe? Why not banish the notion alto- 
gether? Because science itself is one of the chief forms 
in which the spirit of man seeks and realized spiritual 
values. Why should man have science at all? Because 
it is one of the chief ways in which his spirit realizes 
itself in active communion with the nature of things. The 
very existence and growth of science is an expression of 
the self-realization of the human spirit. Man makes him- 
self more at home in the world and, in so doing, is devel- 
oping his own spiritual powers, through discovering and 
using the Truth. Man also feels beauty and sublimity, 
grandeur and terror in nature. He creates, by the cease- 
less urge of his spirit, forms of beauty from wood and 
stone, color and sound. He creates, by the same urge, 





SCIENCE AND RELIGION 199 


social orders and moral ideals through which to satisfy 
his desire for more life and fuller. He seeks to get clearer 
visions and better realizations of justice, peace, purity, 
integrity of spirit, love and fellowship. In sum, the hu- 
man spirit is so constituted that it must pursue and find 
and worship Values; otherwise it perishes. Science, the 
esthetic contemplation of nature, the creation of objects 
of beauty, the realization of righteousness and Love— 
such are the chief forms of spiritual value which man 
pursues. 

No scientific account of man is complete which omits 
to consider this urge of the spirit towards the realization 
of spiritual values. In fact, science cannot account for 
Values in causal terms at all. No physical theory will 
tell me why I love beauty in nature, why I seek to create 
or enjoy the beauties of painting or poetry. No biological 
explanation can tell me why I seek peace and justice and 
love and comradeship in human relations. In these ap- 
preciations, in these feelings of value, we find in imme- 
diate human experience the revelation of the spiritual 
meaning of human life and the world. 

Indeed, science, while itself a principal form in which 
man’s spiritual nature finds satisfaction, offers no substi- 
tute for real living experience. Science is limited to the 
verification, descriptive analysis and linking of facts. 
The facts are matters given. Hvery science depends on 
perception. And perception is a function of the human 
organism in interaction with its environment. Science 
yields only skeletal outlines of reality, not reality itself. 
No science of optics is possible without the mind that sees 
through the brain and eyes. No science of optics can 
take the place of the visual apparatus and the mind. No 


200 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


science of xsthetics is a substitute for the experience of 
beauty, which is impossible without the feeling for beauty. | 
The living reality of nature is given in our immediate 
perceptual experience. No sciences of psychology, soci- 
ology or ethics are possible without the living experience 
of man’s individual and social feelings, valuations, reflec- 
tions and volitions. No sciences of man are substitutes 
for the living experiences of affection, of fear, hope, anger, 
love, striving and aspiration. 

Since religion is the total reaction, in feeling, thought 
and action, of human personality to its whole environ- 
ment, no science of religion is possible without the imme- 
diate experiences of worship, meditation and loyal service 
which constitute the specifically religious attitude. And 
no skeletal theory of religion is a substitute for the living 
experience. Science can describe, analyze and classify the 
data of religious experience and action and relate them to 
other fields of experience and action; but, after as well 
as before, this is done, religzon remazns, like our perceptual, 
esthetic and social experiences, the first-hand reaction of 
the living soul to the whole of reality, the expression of 
the reality and supremacy of the Highest Human Values 
through every aspect of our being. 

Religion is the total attitude of the spirit of man in 
which he affirms his faith that the values of life and ex- 
perience are rooted and grounded in the nature of things. 
Belief in God means belief, faith, in the supremacy of 
the highest values of life. The scientist affirms this faith 
when he unselfishly and devotedly seeks the True, just as 
much as the artist or lover of Beauty and the lover of 
the Good in human relationships affirm it. 

So far, then, from there being any inevitable conflict 





SCIENCE AND RELIGION 201 


between the spirit of science and religion, when we take 
a comprehensive view, we find that science is itself the 
expression and justification of religious faith. For science 
is based on faith in the True, faith in an order that can 
be known by the human mind. Devotion to science is 
devotion to the value of truth. Devotion to beauty is 
another and codrdinate expression of religious faith. A 
third codrdinate expression is devotion to the ethically 
best in human interpersonal relationships. 

Faith in God is the faith that all forms of spiritual 
value, the True not less than the Beautiful and the Good, 
by which the soul of man is lifted from the merely sensu- 
ous and animal life into communion with and possession 
of some fragment of the total and essential Meaning of 
Things, as a whole have their source and firm foundation, 
their rock and fortress in the eternal Spirit of the Cosmos. 
Faith in God is faith that underneath nature and man 
are the everlasting arms which uphold the spiritual values 
—whatsoever things are pure and lovely and of good re- 
port. Such a faith does not require the picture of God 
as a magnificent non-natural man sitting outside of, and 
occasionally intervening in, the course of events. Such a 
faith cannot be shaken by any discoveries of science. For 
every discovery of science, like every creation of beauty 
and every deed wrought or suffering undergone for the 
freeing and enriching of the soul of man is a justification 
of this basic faith in. 


One God, one law, one element, 
And one far-off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves, 


CHAPTER XVIIT 
NATURAL CAUSATION AND MIRACLES 


It is about 2,300 years since Socrates, in the Platonic 
dialogues, showed for all time the supreme importance 
and correct method of arriving at sound definitions. Nev- 
ertheless, almost any of the latest discussions on the sub- 
ject of miracles will illustrate the failure to form clear 
conceptions of the terms used. When we are considering 
the compatibility or incompatibility of natural causation 
and miracles we must first determine what we mean by 
these concepts. 

The universality of natural causation is the funda- 
mental postulate of “‘modern science,” a postulate that 
is exemplified and verified by every new step in science. 
What does this mean? It is sometimes called “the reign 
of law.” Here again we must be careful in our thinking. 
Law does not “reign” in nature as it does in human gov- 
ernance. A law of nature is not an edict or enactment 
that natural forces should obey, but sometimes do not 
obey. A law of nature ts simply a concise statement of 
an orderly or regular sequence in which natural. events 
actually do take place. A law of nature is the formulation 
of an orderly behavior of events; in brief, of linkages of 
facts. We must first observe the actual sequence of 
events; taking care to eliminate all irrelevant factors, and 
to make our observations as complete and our analysis as 

202 





NATURAL CAUSATION AND MIRACLES 203 


thorough as possible. Science postulates that there is 
orderly sequence throughout the whole of nature. There 
is no inherent disorder in nature. Chaos or disorder is 
only an appearance, due to the limitations of our knowl- 
edge and insight. This does not imply that all special 
types of orderly behavior in events can be reduced to the 
lowest or simplest type, as the mechanist assumes. 
Mechanism or materialism assumes that all changes in 
the world are but particular complications of inanimate 
or lifeless and soulless mass-particles. This assumption 
has no sufficient warrant in fact. It explains nothing to 
say, for instance, that a human being is only “‘rationalized 
mud”; for mud that is capable of rational activity is not 
mud in any observable or intelligible meaning of the term 
mud. If mud can become a rational, moral, affectionate, 
beauty-seeking and righteousness-serving being, then it is 
not and never was mere mud. It may be true that there 
is no lifeless matter in the universe, as many idealists 
maintain. Or it may be true that, while lifeless matter 
exists, it is nevertheless potentially instrumental to life. 
Whatever be the ultimate truth on this point, it 1s not in 
harmony with observable facts and, therefore, not scien- 
tific to assert that life is not a higher potency of activity 
than mere matter; or that mind is not a higher potency 
of activity than mere animal life. What we find in fact 
is a succession of orders of activity; a succession of events 
rising one upon another and interdependent—first, the 
activity of mere force centers (electrons) ; second, the ac- 
tivity of vital eenters (organisms), and, third, the activity 
of minds. We do not know all the intimate relations of 
action and passion between these types of monads. But 
we do know that they all exist and interact. Any regular 


204 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


mode of behavior among these monadic elements of nature 
is a case of natural causation. Science postulates rightly 
that every event is a case of such behavior. Every type 
of event has natural causes or necessary antecedents. 

A priort, as Hume put it, anything might cause any- 
thing else. Spirits in America might tunnel mountains 
in Asia without intervening and observable physical in- 
struments. Bodies might rise without means of propul- 
sion and pass through the earth’s atmosphere into inter- 
stellar spaces. Primitive man searched for causes; but 
he assumed that almost anything might produce anything 
else. ‘The accumulated weight of scientific observations 
and predictions makes it in the highest degree improbable 
that spirits can act except through the mediation of physi- 
cal instruments, It is highly improbable that the orderly 
sequential dependencies between events ever has been, or 
ever can be, suspended or interfered with. Every event 
in nature (including human nature) is, in all probability, 
the result of antecedent natural events. Science has no 
use at all for the hypothesis of an extra-mundane cause. 

Can science admit the probability or even the possibility 
of miracles? That depends on what one means by miracle. 
If one means an event which involves the contravention 
or suspension of the natural order and the intrusion of 
some supra-mundane power, science must reject the 
hypothesis as improbable and, still worse, unverifiable. 
There is no good ground for supposing that causes oper- 
ate differently in different historical eras or in different 
places under the same physical and vital conditions. The 
same kinds of forces must operate now as operated in 
Palestine 1900 years ago. Therefore, so far from physical 
or vital miracles in this sense being authentications of a 





NATURAL CAUSATION AND MIRACLES 205 


special Divine authority and power, the claim that they 
occurred casts discredit on the traditional accounts of the 
moral and spiritual persons and principles with which 
they are associated. There is no verifiable instance of 
a human being who was born of a virgin. There is no 
verifiable instance of a really dead human organism being 
raised from the dead in the same body. ‘There is no 
verifiable instance of an earthly physical organism being 
able to rise against gravitational attraction and fly off 
into interstellar space. Every body that is propelled from 
the earth is propelled by a physical force and ultimately 
falls to earth again. We have good grounds for asserting 
that a human organism could not live at all thirty-five 
miles up in our earth’s atmosphere; much less, if hurtling 
through interstellar space. Either the working hypotheses 
of science, which are receiving additional verification 
everyday, are false, or such miraculous events could not 
have occurred. If it be said that God, living either out- 
side or above the world-mechanism, can suspend its opera- 
tion when He will, the answer is twofold: (1) Such a 
hypothesis makes jettison of our abundantly verified con- 
ception of the world as a cosmos, an orderly whole. (2) 
If God so intervened a few times, why should He not 
have done so on urgent recent occasions ? 

The question of the historicity of miracles is not a 
religious question at all. It is a question for science and 
critical history. Spiritual values are discerned and em- 
braced by the spirit. The ethical values of life do not 
depend on any particular description of the problems of 
the history of life and the physical universe. It is irrele- 
vant to the validity of moral ideals and the spiritual value 
of human life, whether man, the whole realm of animals, 


206 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


nature and the solar system itself came into existence 
suddenly or developed slowly by gradual changes extend- 
ing through many millenniums. It makes no difference 
to the meaning of human conduct and existence what 
man’s ancestry may have been or by what steps in par- 
ticular man came to be.what he is; or how and by what 
steps man’s physical and vital environments came to be 
what they are. The deep concern of ethics and ethical 
religion is with the present status and prospects of human 
life. What makes all the difference in the world is this 
—how can we interpret the meaning and value of man’s 
ethical and spiritual actualities and capacities in relation 
to the cosmic whole to-day ? 

No miracles, however numerous or stupendous, will 
serve to validate an ethical and spiritual view of human 
life and the world. The abandonment of miracles, as the 
products of the naive imagination of peoples cradled in a 
world-view incompatible with the scientific conception of 
a well-ordered universe, does not in any respect invalidate 
the ethics of Jesus. Indeed, when we have once grasped 
the great conception that the universe is an orderly and 
continuous whole, in which there are no causeless effects 
and no effectless causes, in other words, a living and con- 
tinuously creative universe; our minds are thereby eman- 
cipated from the crude and often cruel deductions which 
arise from separating God, the ruling spirit of the cosmic 
order, from the world in which he lives and moves and 
has his being. Once admit that the world ordinarily is 
without God and that God enters into commerce with the 
world and man only on sundry extraordinary occasions, 
and we have opened the way to all manner of irrational, 
erude and disordered interpretations of human life. I 





NATURAL CAUSATION AND MIRACLES 207 


commend, in this connection, to the attention of the super- 
naturalistic dualist the terrible effects of the researches 
begun by the Boston clergy in 1681, on special provi- 
dences, and, especially, the direful influence of Increase 
and Cotton Mather. These dualistic supernaturalists 
fomented the witch persecutions. 

When our minds are permeated with the sense of a 

continuous causal order manifested everywhere through- 
out nature and human life, “this doctrine,” to quote 
Spinoza, “not only completely tranquillizes our spirit, but 
also shows us where our highest happiness or blessedness 
is, namely, solely in the knowledge of God, whereby we 
are led to act only as love and piety shall bid us; it shows 
us that we should await and endure fortune’s smiles and 
frowns with an equal mind; this doctrine raises social 
life, inasmuch as it teaches us to hate no man, neither to 
despise, to deride, to envy, or to be angry with any. Fur- 
ther, as it tells us that each should be content with his own, 
and helpful to his neighbour, not from any womanish pity, 
favour or superstition, but solely by the guidance of 
reason, according as the time and occasion demand.” 
(Spinoza, Hthics, Part II, note at end.) 
In place of a Godless world, in which God occasionally 
appears we have then a universe which is eternally the 
Living Garment of Deity. In place of confusing the 
authority and validity of ethical and spiritual principles 
with physical stunts that cause the vulgar to gape, we 
find the continuous validity and authority of ethical and 
spiritual values in the spiritual life itself. 

“And, behold the Lord passed by, and a great and strong 
wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks 
before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind; and 


208 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in 
the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire; but the 
Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small 
voice.” I Kings xix: 11-12. 

“That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which 
is born of the Spirit is spirit.” John iii: 6. 

It is often argued that, if one admit that God is a 
person, then there is no intellectual difficulty in believing 
in physical miracles, since personality is higher than, and 
guides and controls, the physical order. But what is 
meant by the belief that God is a person? If there be 
one God, he cannot be a person. He must be the Perfect 
Person and men only imperfect or partial persons. If 
the doctrine of Divine Personality means that God is ‘a 
magnified and non-natural man,” clearly we have no right 
to suppose that He rules over nature so supremely and 
arbitrarily that he can and will suspend or interrupt, 
when he wills, the natural course of events. .A human 
person is conditioned by nature. A human person is able 
to control natural processes only by observing and obeying 
the laws of the behavior of natural things. Our power 
over nature is simply the power of observation, rational 
inference and synthesis. If God is like a human person, 
then he is a finite being, and conditioned by the behavior 
of nature. 

On the other hand, if we conceive God to be the Uni- 
versal Cosmic Spirit or Supreme Creative Thought and 
Will, who is the Ground of the Natural Order, we cannot 
admit at once that the entire orderly manifestation of 
his creative and sustaining activity in the cosmos is but 
a part of his self-manifestation and that, while he runs 
the world by a certain scheme, which we in part appre- 





NATURAL CAUSATION AND MIRACLES 209 


hend, He, on special occasions and for special reasons, 
suspends the operation of that scheme in order to put into 
effect some better one. 

The fact is, that we have no other means of knowing 
the order of the universe, no other keys to the meaning 
of reality than those furnished us by patient study of the 
facts of nature and human nature. 

The question at issue is not at all whether there is 
absolute mechanical uniformity in the order of nature, 
so that nothing new or different from the old can appear 
in this order; nor whether one have any right to admit 
superordinary events. Nature is indefinitely complex. It 
is supermechanical. The newer and more complex events, 
such as life issuing from apparently lifeless matter, mind 
and reason appearing in certain living forms, cannot be 
explained wholly in terms of the older and more simple 
events. There is creative novelty all along the line. Even 
in so simple a process as the union of H, and O to produce 
water there is novelty. The properties of water are not 
the mechanical sum of the properties of H, and O. 

No, the real question at issue is this—Have we sufficient 
grounds for supposing that, because the career and char- 
‘acter of one human being are so different in their ethical 
and spiritual qualities from the careers and characters of 
all other human beings, therefore, in order to conceive 
this difference adequately, we must assume that, in his 
beginnings, his dealings with the forces of nature and his 
death, he was exempted from the ordinary conditions of 
human existence? If the spiritual supremacy of Jesus 
implies this exemption, then those who accept that su- 
premacy are entitled to make it. 

But they must recognize that the burden of proof rests 


210 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


upon them. For science and the comparative history of 
human thought unite in rendering extremely dubious the 
likelihood of any human person being exempted from the 
ordinary conditions of human existence. Science, as the 
description of the normal course of natural events, is 
estopped by such an instance. The comparative history 
of human thought yields overwhelming evidence of the 
natural tendency of the human mind, in its animistic or 
prescientific stage, to multiply miracles; not merely as 
signs, but as wonders evidencing control of Mana, the 
mysterious wonder-working power. It cannot be doubted 
that the New Testament writers lived in this prescientific 
atmosphere. 

The attitude of a scientifically minded person towards 
the revivification of the dead, the transformation of water 
into wine, the virgin birth and the resurrection of the 
body laid in the tomb is—these things were possible but 
highly improbable. 

To argue that miracles may have happened, because life 
is not explainable in terms of mechanical uniformity and 
because it uses and controls matter and energy, and, hence, 
may exist apart from them, is to shoot wide of the mark. 
We admit that life is not explainable wholly in terms of 
mechanical uniformity. But there are biological uniform- 
ity and continuity. There are psychological uniformity 
and continuity. Moreover, we know nothing of life exist- 
ing apart from matter and energy. We have no grounds, 
in fact, for assuming that the Universal Life, the Cosmic 
Life, exists apart from matter and energy. The con- 
tinuous order of natural events, which we denominate 
“material,” is an aspect of the continuous orderly activity 
of the Cosmic Life. 





NATURAL CAUSATION AND MIRACLES 211 


Again, it is quite true that the laws of nature, as we 
know them, are not absolute and final principles which 
rule over the procession of material events like a king 
over his subjects. ‘These laws are but partial and imper- 
_ fect descriptions of the actual course of events. It is 
precisely because they are verifiable that we accept them 
so far as they go. Anything which contravenes them has 
the burden of proof laid upon it. How are we to verify 
these exceptions, suspensions of ordinary laws, or inrushes 
of higher laws? They are found in all prescientific forms 
of thinking. They do not validate any genuine spiritual 
intuition or insight. It is then a stumbling-block in the 
way of an intelligent ethical faith to tie up ethical values 
with the question whether these dubious physical events 
occurred or not in the remote past. 

Jesus refused to work signs and wonders to compel 
faith. The originals of the physical miracles attributed 
to him were probably misunderstood and misremembered 
parabolic sayings of his. 

The previous arguments, which are of a general scien- 
tific character, and which render improbable and unnec- 
essary the literal belief in the virgin birth of Jesus and 
in the reanimation of his earthly body are reinforced by 
an examination of the New Testament records. 

The virgin birth is not so much as mentioned by Paul, 
whose epistles are much the earliest extant Christian doc- 
trines. It may be replied that he knew nothing about it, 
although it had occurred. If so, then it played no part 
in the earliest Christian traditions. If he knew of it he 
would certainly have made use of it since for Paul, Jesus 
was at once the Heavenly Man, a subordinate Deity, and 
the true Messiah. 


212 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


It is not mentioned at all in Mark, which is generally 
conceded to be the earliest Gospel; nor in John, the most 
spiritual and mystical of all the Gospels. Indeed in John 
1:45, Jesus is referred to as the son of Joseph. In 
Matthew, which Gospel was written to prove that Jesus 
was the true Messiah foretold by the prophets, while the 
story of the virgin birth is fully given, the descent of 
Jesus from David, which descent was taken to establish 
his Messianic claim, is traced through Joseph. The fair 
conclusion is that the story of the virgin birth is a later 
interpolation due (1) to the mistranslation of the pas- 
sage in Isaiah vii: 14, wherein the Hebrew talmah, prop- 
erly meaning in this case a young spouse (probably the 
prophet’s own wife) was wrongly translated parthenos, 
virgin, in the Greek Septuagint; (2) to the misapplica- 
tion of this mistranslation as a Messianic prophecy; and 
(3) to the growth of an ascetic dualism of spirit and 
flesh which put marriage, as a necessary evil, below the 
state of virginity. Logically, to argue that the virgin 
birth was necessary if Jesus were sinless, is at once to 
detract from Jesus’ full humanity, to degrade marriage, 
and to imply that the immaculate conception runs clear 
back to Seth, the son of Adam. To say all this is not 
to deny the delicacy and beauty of the story, or to be 
insensible to the way in which it has touched the hearts 
of devout believers in the spiritual supremacy of Jesus.* 
The story is a symbol which enshrines a precious jewel 
of faith and devotion—the moral uniqueness and _per- 
fection of the Son of Man. 

Paul is of course the earliest witness to the faith in 
the risen life of Christ. He places Christ’s appearances 
to him (whether in the body or out of the body, he knows 





NATURAL CAUSATION AND MIRACLES 213 


not) and the appearances to other disciples on the same 
plane (I. Cor. xv: 4-9). He mentions an appearance to 
above five hundred, which is not otherwise recorded. He 
says Christ first appeared to Cephas, that is, to Peter. 
In Acts ix: 8-8, we are told that Paul, on the road to 
Damascus, saw a light and heard the voice of Jesus, 
whereas the men who accompanied him heard the voice, 
but saw no one. In Acts xxii: 9, Paul is quoted as saying 
that his companions beheld the light, but heard not the 
voice. 

In Mark xvi, we are told that Christ first appeared 
to Mary Magdalene, then to the two disciples, then to the 
eleven at meat. 

In Matthew xxviii, we are told that he appeared first 
to the two Marys, whom he told to tell the brethren to 
go to Galilee: there he appeared to them and gave them 
a commission to evangelize the world. 

In Luke xxiv, Christ is said to have appeared first to 
the two disciples, then to Peter, and finally to the eleven 
near Bethany. 

_In John xx-xxi, he is represented as appearing first 
to Mary Magdalene: then to all the disciples except 
Thomas in a closed room; then, finally, eight days later, 
to all, including Thomas, to whom he showed his wound; 
finally to six of them fishing at the Sea of Tiberias. 

It is impossible that he should have appeared with a 
reanimated body, passed through closed doors, have both 
appeared and not appeared in the neighborhood of Jeru- 
salem and in Galilee, and have appeared in the same way 
to Paul on the road to Damascus. 

The only solid facts in these confusing narratives are: 
(1) That the disciples somehow became convinced that 


214 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


their Master was alive and was with them in spirit. This 
conviction gave them a renewal of courage, a great in- 
fusion of energy, and a firmer dedication to the spread 
of His gospel. (2) That Paul and John were both 
mystics. There can be no doubt that the appearances to 
Paul were in the nature of mystical visions, and that at 
the roots of John’s narrative there is a mystical con- 
ception. 

It is possible to believe that Jesus appeared with an 
ethereal body, but this is mere speculation. We cannot 
fully account for the manner in which the faith in the 
continued existence and presence of the Master arose, 
although we can trace its extraordinary effects. If it be 
said that the only alternative to acceptance of the reani- 
mated body as the manner of the resurrection is the ad- 
mission that Christianity is founded on illusions, namely, 
subjective visions, the reply is twofold: (1) Christianity, 
as the discipleship of Jesus, is founded on something far 
more solid and universal in appeal than the reanimation 
of a dead body. It is founded on the witness of the 
ethical spirit in man which responds to the supreme moral 
grandeur of the person of Jesus as he lived among men. 
(2) Who can say what is merely subjective, and what is 
objective in the things of the spirit? We must perforce, 
with our bodily investiture, clothe our profoundest 
thoughts, our noblest aspirations and deepest insights in 
bodily symbols. The symbols change, but the spirit re- 
mains. Who shall venture to say, in view of Paul’s 
achievement and of those of all Christlike souls, that that 
only is objective which is physical and that the spiritual 
is subjective illusion? This is materialism in philosophy. 
I have to say, then, and I say it not in the spirit of abuse, 





NATURAL CAUSATION AND MIRACLES 215 


but as a statement of principle, that all who would make 
the validity, the truth, the beauty and spiritual authority 
of Christ’s person and work stand or fall with the literal 
acceptance of the virgin birth and the reanimation and 
flight through the atmosphere and interstellar spaces of 
his crucified body are teaching the crassest sort of phil- 
osophical materialism. These early disciples, who were 
simple souls, perhaps could not otherwise clothe their faith 
in the triumph of Christ and the continued reality of 
spirit than in physical symbols. But it is surely time 
that the defenders of Christianity saw things in a clearer 
light. 

For one to whom Christ’s supremacy is witnessed by 
conscience and heart, that is in the spirit, there is no 
need of empty tombs with grave clothes lying folded; 
no need to put physical hands into physical wounds. For 
him that which is truly objective and eternal is the Uni- 
versal Spirit of which Jesus of Nazareth was the highest 
Incarnation. 

If by miracles be meant events of which we do not under- 
stand the natural antecedents, we must admit that there 
are many such events. Our knowledge is very imperfect, 
but it grows from more to more. By a ‘‘wonderful’” event 
we may mean, either one that we wonder at because we 
do not know fully its causes, or one which we admire for 
the intelligence, beauty and nobility of character which 
it reveals. Into both categories the healing miracles of 
Jesus fall, since we do not understand the relation of 
mind and body and these were works of love. But it is 
a verified fact that human beings, through suggestion, 
through arousing faith and devotion, can influence other 
human beings. The influence of suggestion, persuasion, 


216 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


faith and love are very powerful factors in healing func- 
tional disorders. ‘The influence of the mind on the body 
is a fact just as is the converse. The healing miracles 
of Jesus do not contravene the principles of science, since 
other human beings have healed and do heal the psycho- 
physical organisms (the soul-body complexes) which are 
- their fellows. It is no more unreasonable to believe that 
Jesus was supreme among the sons of men as a moral 
and spiritual personality, exercising in superlative degree 
powers that others exercise in lesser degree, than it is to 
say that Shakespeare is supreme among poetic dramatists. 
And, finally, the true basis of wonder, reverence, and love 
for Jesus is for His Person as He was and isto men. The 
works and words are revelations of what the person es- 
sentially is, and this goes beyond all works. Shakespeare, 
the spirit or man, was greater than all his works. We 
feel shining through his works his greatness. 

Browning distinguishes the “what does,” the ‘what 
knows” and the “‘what is” as three ascending levels in 
human personality. The ‘‘What is’ is the Essential 
Spirit. Apply this to Jesus. What He does and says 
give glimpses, broken lights, through which in loving 
admiration we feel what He was and 1s to man. 

Any personality is a miracle; not as contraversing the 
laws of nature, but as being a spiritually rich and worthy 
and mysterious embodiment or revelation of the spirit of 
the universe. To say that the Person of Jesus is the 
highest, the most Divine among the sons of men is to 
recognize, in gratitude and love, that this Friend of man 
is the fullest, the most adequate, expression in human 
form of the highest spiritual values of existence. In this 
sense His Person is a miracle, a wonder, the most signal 





Ce 


NATURAL CAUSATION AND MIRACLES 217 


instance of union and consummation of these qualities of 
human personality that, wherever we find them, we bow 
to in reverent love and through communion with which 
we seek and gain moral strength and spiritual renewal. 


Notr. The remainder of this work is a statement, in less 
technical and argumentative form, of the ideas developed more 
elaborately in Man and the Cosmos. 


CHAPTER XIX 
WHAT FAITH IS 


The emphasis laid on Faith, in the teachings of Jesus 
and in the New Testament writings generally, is very 
noteworthy. It occurs in eleven important passages in 
the Gospel of Matthew alone. Jesus rebukes his disciples 
for their little faith. He praises a Samaritan woman 
and a Roman Centurion for their great faith and, because 
of it, accedes to their demands. He cannot do mighty 
works in one place because of their lack of faith. Paul 
makes salvation or justification the outcome of faith. In 
the eleventh and twelfth chapters of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews there is a great hymn of faith, in which are 
recited what saints and heroes have done by faith. There 
faith is defined as “‘the giving substance to things hoped 
for, the assurance of things unseen” (Heb. xi: 1). 

Contrast with the position of faith in the Gospels the 
lament of Matthew Arnold, 


The Sea of Faith, 
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore, 
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d. 
But now I only hear 
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
Retreating, to the breath 
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear 
And naked shingles of the world. 

—Dover Bracu. 


218 





WHAT FAITH IS 219 


And the doubting, hesitating faith of Tennyson, so 
accurate a mirror of the soul of the Victorian era, 


I stretch lame hands of faith and grope 
And gather dust and chaff and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all 
And faintly trust the larger hope. 
—“In Memoriam,” LV :4. 


What, then, is Faith? It is contrasted with sight and 
knowledge. : 


For now we know in part and we prophesy in part. Now 
we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. 


Faith is not blind credulity, nor is it the mind’s passive 
assent to theoretical propositions. Jaith is the dynamic 
expression, of the whole man. It springs from the need 
for action and endurance. It is the personal resolve and 
determination to take risks, to adventure forth on a 
hazardous quest; because one trusts life, the universe, 
one’s Own powers. Faith is essentially a volitional or 
active attitude. He who has faith is ready to wager 
thereon, willing to venture his all. Faith is the dynamic 
urge of life ztself. Its true opposite is not skepticism but 
timidity and fear. Faith is that attitude of trust and 
confident boldness in the response of reality to our deepest 
needs and highest personal strivings which spurs us to 
do and to dare. Faith is loyalty to the highest values of 
life. Faith, as Hoeffding puts it, is akin to faithfulness. 
It presupposes trustworthiness, dependableness in the 
object towards which it is directed. 

The entire history of the evolution of life on the earth 
is the story of faith. Living organisms, acting in response 


220 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


to the pressure of their environments on their native urge 
or striving for life, fared forth to maintain themselves 
and to reproduce their kind under changing conditions. 
The aquatic organisms, venturing on land and becoming 
modified in order to adopt themselves to the new condi- 
tions, obeyed blindly the same urge of life which man 
feels and which leads himself te plan, to invent, to labor 
and to venture. The response of the pigmented spot to 
the light led to the development of the seeing eye. The 
response of the organism to changed conditions of move- 
ment led to the development of legs and wings. The 
response of the otolith to waves of air led to the ear and 
to hearing. So on one might go at much length, to illu- 
strate the nature of life as a faith-urge. When man 
consciously strives, risks, adventures, he is pursuing, at a 
high level, the same urge. Faith, then, is the urge of 
hfe become conscious and, therefore, able to make plan- 
ful choices and resolves. Faith and will are thus but two 
aspects of the same dynamic psychical principle. Will 
is of broader scope than faith, since one may will in the 
light of full knowledge. But where one wills in the light 
of imperfect knowledge one wills in faith. 

Paul is right. ‘‘We know in part and we prophesy 
in part.” Without faith we cannot go forward, cannot 
take a single urgent and significant step in life. The 
practical man (and we all have to be practical men) has 
to act on very partial evidence. In order to carry on, he 
must have faith in the stability of nature’s order, faith 
in the trustworthiness and capability of other persons, 
faith in his friends and associates, faith in his country. 
The scientist could not take a single step in his investiga- 
tions if he had no faith either in the stability of the 





WHAT FAITH IS 221 


natural order, the trustworthiness of his own mental 
powers, or of his fellow investigators. Lovers must have 
faith, friendship requires it. Even among casual ac- 
quaintances a modicum of faith is necessary. If one 
assumes an attitude of suspicion and distrust towards all 
other persons, one can get nowhere. They are shut off 
from one’s view. One can get no codperation, one cannot 
even get knowledge of others. Confidence begets confi- 
dence, codperation and communion. 

Faith is contrasted with knowledge. In truth they are 
interdependent.. When we act on faith we act on imper- 
fect knowledge and the result of our action is enlargement 
of knowledge. This is so even when the event shows our 
faith misplaced. Thus faith is an anticipation of knowl- 
edge. It runs before and leads to knowledge. For all 
genuine knowledge is the product of active experience, is 
experimental in origin. To know truly I must actively 
inquire. Knowledge consists in having a direct acquaint- 
ance with the properties or behaviors of things and their 
interrelations. Its goal is the conception of the world as 
a unity of interrelated factors. This goal is never 
achieved. Knowledge remains partial. But the very 
quest for new knowledge and the confidence that our 
powers of knowing do not wholly deceive us is an act of 
faith—faith that our powers of perceiving and conceiving 
are not false guides, that we are not dupes of an unin- 
telligible and brutal universe. Thus knowledge, in its 
‘inception and progress, implies a reasonable faith, by 
which, as intelligent beings, we are justified; through the 
very growth from more to more of knowledge and the 
consequent increase in our powers of intelligent control 
of nature and adaptation of ourselves to nature. The very 


222 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


possibility of this growth in knowledge and practical 
adaptation presupposes the stability, the reliability of the 
natural order and a basic harmony between that order and 
the perceptive and intellective powers of man. The quest 
for knowledge depends on faith in the possibility and 
value of truth, faith in a stable order in the universe. 
If this faith were illusory both pure and applied knowl- 
edge would be mocking delusions. 

A faith in the reliability of any thing or being—in 
friends, lovers, associates, strangers, the order of nature 
—is a working hypothesis. On the basis of our interests 
or needs and of their relation to the environing conditions 
of our lives, we assume that, if we do certain things, 
certain results will follow and we act upon the assumption. 
The faith is justified or refuted by the events that follow 
upon the actions. 

Religious faith 1s simply the most comprehensive and 
inclusive expression of the dynamic urge of life, of the 
will-to-live, of the unfolding personality. Religious faith 
is trust in the ultimate goodness of the Universal Order, 
faith in God is the trust, the practical venture, that good- 
ness is supreme in the end, that there is an ultimate and 
supreme meaning in things as a whole and that this mean- 
ing takes up into itself whatever is worthiest in human 
endeavor and valuation. Using the term “person” for 
the achiever and bearer of the higher values we may say 
that faith is the trust of persons in the Supreme as Per- 
sonality. 

Religious faith is the consummation and completion of 
all lesser and partial faiths. For religious faith is the 
confident trust and boldness, the courage to act on the 
hypothesis that the whole meaning of life is good and the 





WHAT FAITH IS 223 


nature of the Universe responsive to the Good. Religious 
faith is an active and trustful attitude of the whole per- 
sonality. It surges up from the deeps of life. It arises 
from the fundamental feeling of life, of its budding mean- 
ings, its needs, its promises. It is the affirmation of the 
reality of goodness through every aspect of our being. 
It is confidence in the supremacy and permanence in the 
universe of the purest and deepest values of personality, 
of truth, integrity, friendship and fellowship, justice and 
love and spiritual beauty. 

If we are to live truly, we must be willing to make a 
wager on the worth of life, willing to affirm that life will 
open out and be filled with more meaning as we venture 
to live in loyalty and devotion to the things of the spirit. 
We do not know in advance that the life of dedication to 
moral and spiritual interests will be the most satisfying 
and enduring life, that it will bring steadfast peace and 
courage to suffer as well as to do. We come to have direct 
acquaintance with the spiritual satisfactions of life only 
by loyal faith and service of spiritual values. We live 
forwards. We cannot live at all unless we trust the future. 
To trust the future, in a fully religious sense, is to endure 
and venture in the spirit of “Not my [egoistic sensuous | 
will be done, but thy will for truth, justice, love and beauty 
in the soul be done.” Faith in God is confidence in the 
reality and supremacy of the Cosmic Spirit which is the 
eternal ground, the Sustainer and Guardian of all spir- 
itual qualities that are experienced in part in human per- 
sons. At its fullest, completest pitch, then, faith is the 
act of trust of a person who hungers and thirsts after 
goodness, after integrity, purity, love and selfless service, 
in the Being who is the paragon and champion of all 


224 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


these qualities of personality. The act of faith is always 
the voluntary affirmation, the choice and resolve of a moral 
will, that the spiritual qualities of life must and shall be 
supreme. All life requires faith. The highest, fullest 
life requires the highest, fullest faith. Faith is at once . 
the affirmation of our deepest rational and spiritual will 
and the recognition of our utter dependence, for hfe and 
growth in spiritual things, on Him in whom is neither 
variableness or shadow of turning. It is the affirmative 
trust that underneath all our struggles after better things 
are the everlasting arms. Faith in Christ is trust and 
confidence that the life revealed by Christ is the expression 
of the deepest and most enduring Meaning, Will and 
Purpose of God. It is the fruition and completion of all 
lesser faiths. Since we must trust life and the universe 
and adventure forth in order to live at all, why not make 
the venture that the Highest Life is the most trustworthy, 
the most stable and dependable life? It is surely illogical 
for us to trust in the order of nature, in the facts of 
common experience, in the laws of science, in the relia- 
bility of our fellows and to distrust the noblest, the deep- 
est, the most satisfying meanings and values which that 
life reveals. For who can doubt that integrity, purity, 
justice, love, friendship, fellowship, service, are the most 
truly satisfying values that we can pursue and possess? 

Religious faith is the direct and inevitable expression 
of the recognition of the worth and dignity of the rational 
personality. No one can act on the belief in the supremacy 
of moral and spiritual persons over everything else in the 
universe without having a religious faith. If the com- 
munity of spiritual selves is the object of our highest 
devotion and our unremitting endeavor we have faith in 








WHAT FAITH IS 225 


God, for this faith shines forth in our deeds. Thus, in 
our active faith, a faith that is real because manifest in 
deeds, in the worth and dignity of whatsoever appertains 
to the maintenance and enhancement of the spiritual com- 
munity of persons, we experience as though it were present 
what, as matter of fullest acquaintance is future—the 
presence of the Perfect overshadowing us and guiding us. 


CHAPTER XX 
POETRY AND RELIGION 


Art is the work of the creative imagination. This 
spiritual power, in contradistinction to the reproductive 
imagination, creates from the images supplied by inner 
and outer experience and reflection, new forms, fresh 
symbols, which better convey and which better enhance 
the meanings and values that the spirit seeks than does 
the routine order of experience and memory. What dif- 
ferentiates art from the other works of creative thought in 
science and prosy historical record is the quickening power 
it possesses to arouse, through its vivid and dynamic sym- 
bols, ennobling, harmonizing, satisfying emotions. The 
acid test of art is always this, does it arouse in the soul 
a significant meaning or value bathed in emotion? The 
abstract and precise and colorless symbols of science do 
not usually arouse emotion; although a great synoptic 
hypothesis, such as the conservation of energy, the evolu- 
tionary theory, the electronic theory of matter, do arouse 
emotions in those minds fitted to be quickened into imagi- 
native feeling by the contemplation of the sweep and 
depth and harmony of the principles. But art makes a 
more general appeal. Its symbols are more concrete— 
wood, stone, bronze, pigment, sound—and through the 
harmonious and well proportioned relations of their parts 
arouse pleasurable emotions. 

226 





POETRY AND RELIGION 227 


The close kinship of art and religion is revealed in the 
well-nigh universial use made of the arts to express, in 
concrete symbols, religious imagery and to arouse spiritual 
feelings. Every religion uses some of the arts. Every 
great epoch in the history of a religious culture has been 
rich in religious art. Witness ancient Greece, Buddhist 
India, China and Japan, ancient Eastern Christianity, 
and Western Catholic Christianity in the twelfth, thir- 
teenth and following centuries. Architecture, sculpture, 
painting, music and poetry are all employed in the service 
of religion. 

Poetry is the highest and completest of the arts. The 
part that poetry has played in religion is well known. The 
Odes of Pindar, the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, 
Virgil’s Aeneid, the Hebrew Psalms and Prophets, Dante’s 
Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, the poetry of 
Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning—all these, not to 
mention hymnology—are great religious poems. There 
are very definite ethical and religious philosophies in the 
poetry of Burns, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson and 
Browning. Shelley’s poetry is pervaded by an ethical and 
humane religious idealism. 

Even Shakespeare, whose poetry seems secular, has a 
religious spirit, a broad and balanced ethical humanism, 
whose controlling principles are akin to the spirit of Jesus’ 
religion, 

The grounds for this intimate union of poetry and re- 
ligion are not far to seek. Poetry, said Aristotle, is truer 
than history. Poetry, we may say, is a truer expression, 
because a more intimate, more concrete and richer expres- 
sion of the inmost values, the aspirations and strivings of 
the human spirit, than any narrative of outer facts or 


228 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


than the abstractions of science. Science supplies us with 
the surest instruments for improving the physical lot of 
man. But the instruments supplied by the intellect must 
be directed and controlled by spiritual and emotional 
values—by love and loyalty, devotion and self-sacrifice, 
sympathy and vision, hope and faith—if they are to 
further the improvement of man’s social and mental life. 
The emotions must be aroused in chastened and sublimated 
form, the impulses must be harmonized and directed to 
ideal ends. It is not necessary to set up an absolute oppo- 
sition between reason and feeling, in order to say with 
Tennyson that 


If e’er when faith had fall’n asleep, 
I heard a voice “believe no more” 
And heard an ever breaking shore 
That tumbled in the Godless deep; 


A warmth within the breast would melt 
The freezing reason’s colder part, 
And like a man in wrath the heart 
Stood up and answered “I have felt.” 
“In Memoriam,” CXXIV. 


But it is true that pure reason alone, gives us no knowl- 
edge of concrete reality. The function of reason is to 
relate and interpret, to formulate and connect into a sys- 
tematic whole, the meanings and values that spring from 
the heart of immediate experience. In all affairs that 
deeply concern our lives; in friendship and comradeship, 
in the experiences of love and beauty, in the dynamic im- 
pulses that move us to action, in the spiritual enrichment 
of experience, it is immediate experiences—perception and 
feeling—that count most. Reason is ancillary and instru- 
mental with respect to our attitudes towards the whole 





POETRY AND RELIGION P29 


of reality, the sum of things, as with respect to our rela- 
tions to our fellow men and external nature. Immediate 
experiences—perceptions, impulses and emotions—are the 
sources of action and the materials from which values and 
meanings are distilled—are both the beginnings and the 
endterms of experience and action. 

There are two meanings, a more comprehensive and a 
narrower one, in which the term Poetry may be taken. 
In its narrow meaning poetry is the expression, in metrical 
and rhythmical words and in an imaginative and impas- 
sioned manner, of human deeds, thoughts and valuations, 
and of the influence of nature on the mind and will of 
man; of the interplay of man and man, man and nature, 
man and God. 

In its more comprehensive meaning, poetry includes all 
impassioned and imaginative utterances, all winged 
thoughts. The line between poetry and imaginative and 
impassioned prose is indistinct and tends to vanish. For 
the prose writer whose soul is on fire with a thought, a 
vision, a great deed or a great conception, expresses him- 
self in concrete symbols and his utterances take on rhyth- 
mical and even metrical movement. It is this wider sense 
of the term poetry that Wordsworth has in mind when 
he says: 


The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown 
benefactor ; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude; the Poet, 
singing a song in which all human beings join with him, 
rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and 
hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of 
all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in 
the countenance of science... . 

Its object is truth, not individual and local, but general 
and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but 


230 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


carried into the heart of passion; truth which is its own tes- 
timony, which gives competence and confidence to the tribunal 
to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal. 
Poetry is the image of man and nature.... 

The Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a 
greater promptness to think and feel without immediate ex- 
ternal excitement, and a greater power in expressing such 
thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that manner. 
But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the general 
passions and thoughts and feelings of men. 


Shelley says: 


A poem is the very image of life expressed in its external 
truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, 
that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no 
other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and 
effect ; the other is the creation of actions according to the 
unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind 
of the Creator, which is, itself, the image of all other minds.? 


Again, with respect to the moral influence of poetry, 
Shelley writes: 


The great secret of morals is love; or a going-out of our 
nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful 
which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A 
man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and compre- 
hensively ; he must put himself in the place of another and 
of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must 
become his own. ‘The great instrument of moral good is 
the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by act- 
ing upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of 
the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever 
new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimi- 





1 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. 
24 Defense of Poetry. 





POETRY AND RELIGION 231 


lating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which 
form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves 
fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ 
of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise 
strengthens a limb. Poetry, and the principle of self, of 
which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and 
mammon of the world. 

Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the 
center and circumference of knowledge; it is that which com- 
prehends all science, and that to which all science must be 
referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of 
all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, 
and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, 
denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren 
world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of 
the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface 
and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of 
the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, 
as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets 
of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue, love, patri- 
otism, friendship—what were the scenery of the beautiful 
universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on 
this side of the grave—and what were our aspirations beyond 
it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those 
eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation 
dare not ever soar? 

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of 
the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent 
visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with 
place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, 
and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but 
elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that even 
in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be 
pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. 
It is, as it were, the interpenetration of a diviner nature 
through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind 
over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces 


232 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These 
and corresponding conditions of being are experienced prin- 
cipally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most 
enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by 
them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of 
virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked 
with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as 
what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject 
to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organiza- 
tion, but they can color all that they combine with the 
evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the 
representation of a scene or a passion will touch the en- 
chanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever ex- 
perienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried 
image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that 
is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanish- 
ing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and 
veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth 
among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those 
with whom their sisters abide—abide, because there is no 
portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which 
they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems 
from decay the visitations of the divinity in man. 

Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty 
of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that 
which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, 
grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union 
under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes 
all that it touches, and every form moving within the radi- 
ance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an 
incarnation of the spirit which it breathes; its secret alchemy 
turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from 
death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the 
world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which 
is the spirit of its forms. 


If we accept the nature and high office of poetry as 
thus described, it becomes understandable why a consider- 





POETRY AND RELIGION 233 


able part of the noblest poetry of the race is religious, 
and why spiritual religion is the soul of which this poetry 
is the concrete imaginative and impassioned utterance. 
For the poet is the supremest human incarnation of the 
Creative Cosmic Mind. Brooding in rapt contemplation 
over the nature of man, his vicissitudes, his moral failures 
and successes, his sufferings and joys, his visions and 
aspirations, his undying quest for union with the Perfect 
and Eternal, the poet, by the creative power of an imagi- 
nation enkindled by humane passion, interprets man to 
man, nature to man, and God to man. 

The poet is the maker, the creator of a higher, 
richer, more harmonious realm of spiritual being than any 
which the workaday humdrum world of ordinary life 
supplies. The poet escapes from the treadmill of daily 
and hourly existence. He shuns statistics, and flees the 
commonplace. He soars beyond the mechanical casual 
order. And what he sees and feels in this flight into the 
Empyrean reached by spiritual imagination, he clothes in 
vivid, concrete and pulsating symbols, so that we lesser 
mortals may warm ourselves by that divine fire that the 
Poet has filched from heaven, may breathe that rarer and 
serener air in which he has moved. 

All great religious geniuses are poets, though not all 
poets are great religious geniuses. The writers of the 
Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Job, were great poets. 
Jesus is supremely a poet. With homely and familiar 
symbols, drawn from the flowers, the birds, the animals, 
the growing and harvesting of the grain, the familiar 
incidents of natural life and human life, Jesus throws a 
warm and vivid, illuminating and transfiguring light upon 
the divine potencies in the soul of man; in its spiritual 


234 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


relations to fellow man, nature and God. How cold and 
strained, how lifeless and abstract, seem all the meta- 
physical discussions of creeds and dogmas beside these 
simple, vital and profound parables of his! He liberates 
and quickens the will-to-live deeply and harmoniously. 

Form and substance are inseparable in all genuine 
poetry, as in all genuine religious feeling and imagination. 
Religious poetry ministers to spiritual feeling and incites 
to selfless devotion, to communion and prayer, by clothing 
its intuitions in concrete symbols alive with color, move- 
ment and passion. 

The superiority of poetry, as a medium of expression 
for religious feeling and aspiration, consists in the fact 
that it speaks in concrete, moving, impassioned symbols 
compacted of the imagination. Science abstracts from the 
warm and varied stream of experience. Science, of neces- 
sity, “murders to dissect.”’ Every science is one-sided. It 
tears some aspect of living experience out of its total 
setting. It arranges its data in statistical tables. It 
formulates equations and laws. It furnishes good skeleton 
maps for the pedestrian traveler but little solid and nour- 
ishing food for the imaginative and emotional life. More- 
over, conceptual knowledge is ragged at the edges. Con- 
ceptual knowledge is always incomplete as well as 
skeletonlike. It promises more than it can perform. The 
fact is related to another fact, and so on, until the formula 
or law is substituted for the individuality, the variedness, 
the concreteness, the livingness of the experiential facts. 
In all scientific work, as in all merely practical activity, 
such as the making and administering of laws or even 
the endeavor to live according to right principles, there 
is always a surd—something left over, something further 





POETRY AND RELIGION 235 


to relate and interpret. Philosophy corrects the abstrac- 
tions of science, in that it recalls us to a total, a synoptic 
or comprehensive and harmonious survey and evaluation 
of experience in tis wholeness: Philosophy is thus the 
most concrete of intellectual procedures. A philosophy 
which leaves out of account any main aspect or phase of 
experience and life is not a genuine philosophy. The 
true standpoint of philosophy is the quest for the total 
and harmonious, the global or integral point of view. 
But’ philosophy is still an intellectual attitude, a con- 
ceptual point of view, a contemplative theory. When 
philosophy becomes impassioned and is expressed in con- 
crete symbols, as in Plato, then the lines of distinction 
between it and religion and poetry vanish. The perennial 
charm and stimulation of Plato resides just in this—that 
he is at once philosopher, poet and spiritual mystic. 

Poetry is the richest of the arts because, using articulate 
language, it can compass the widest range of expression 
—fine nuances of individual feeling in the lyric, deepest 
reflection in the elegiac and the problems of cosmic destiny 
and fate in the tragedy. Poetry can be made the most 
supple and socially appealing means of expression for 
human feeling and thought in all their length, breadth and 
depth of meaning. What makes all true art is range and 
power of concrete expression; poetry exceeds all other 
arts aS an Instrument of expression. In it thought and 
feeling are married in indissoluble union. 

Poetry, like all aesthetic forms of expression, mediates 
the union, the communion, of the individual soul with 
the object. The self is taken out of itself, is enlarged 
and merged in the object—the soul of man becomes one 
with the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, the humorous. 


236 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


Thus poetry, even when it expresses but an individual 
emotion, delivers the self from itself; fuses the ego in 
feeling and rapt contemplation with a complete and satis- 
fying spiritual object. In its more significant forms 
poetry is the vehicle of a self-transcendence which is at- 
tainable through the merging of the self with the Perfect 
and self-complete. 

Now, religion is for men the most universal way oz 
self-transcendence, of escape from the petty and trivial 
and discordant selfhood of the moment, through com- 
munion with, union with, vision of, the Perfect, the abso- 
lutely Worthful. In religion we have an integral attitude 
of soul, by which it is united with the totality or integral 
unity of supreme values regarded as a concrete and living 
Reality. Thus, in religion, one throws the center of one’s 
being beyond one’s actual selfhood. One is merged in, 
united with and transformed by the Perfect. All genuine 
religious experience is a vision, a symbolic experience 
ablaze with the feeling for the Whole and Perfect. The 
soul is enlarged, transformed, purified by this union or 
communion. Religion and serious poetry are one in aim 
and meaning. 

Poetry, I have said, is truer than science. Poetry is 
indeed the breath and finer spirit of Knowledge. All high 
and serious poetry is the expression, in symbols that en- 
kindle our nobler emotions and quicken our hearts, of 
the ethical and spiritual meanings and values of human 
life. Poetry is truer than science since it stirs into feeling 
and expression the motives, the ideals and aspirations that 
are the very essence of the human spirit. 

Poetry and religion cannot be separated. Some one has 
said that religion is the poetry of the heart. It were 





POETRY AND RELIGION 237 


truer to say that poetry is the impassioned, harmonious 
and proportioned utterance of the spiritual life. There- 
fore poetry is the most adequate means of expression for 
religion. A prosaic religion is but a maimed and one- 
sided religion—a religion that fails to enlist in its service 
the power of the creative imagination to give concreteness 
and vividness and warmth to spiritual values and aspira- 
tions. Indeed, since religion is fundamentally the feeling 
of union with the Higher, the Perfect and Integral and 
this feeling cannot flourish without imaginative projec- 
tion, poetry is the natural language of religion. 

Moreover, the feelings of beauty, harmony, sublimity, 
which are enkindled and nourished supremely by poetry 
and in some degrees by all the arts, are essential elements 
of a full religion. Religion, in order to be full and com- 
plete, must include and satisfy the human longing for 
beauty, order and harmony in Spiritual Experience. The 
good and the beautiful must be ultimately one. The pur- 
est and therefore most satisfying joys come through the 
experiences of Beauty when the object has moral propor- 
tion and harmony. Religion must minister to this craving 
of the spirit for joy in Beauty, in Harmony, Proportion 
and Grandeur. 

It may be objected, to our assertion of the intimate 
union of poetry and religion and especially to the descrip- 
tion of religion as poetry, that poetry is fiction; the prod- 
uct of mere imagination and, therefore, not true. But 
this is a philistine and purely external attitude. All 
noble poetic utterance is the expression of the deepest 
feelings and most meaningful ideas in regard to human 
life. It voices the sorrows, joys, aspirations and devo- 
tions of the individual human heart. It depicts the inter- 


238 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


play of human passions, the passional reactions of Man 
to Man, of Man to Nature and of Man to the Divine. 
Poetry, of course, as the rhythmic and impassioned utter- 
ance of human feelings and thoughts and the vivid de- 
piction of human actions and human sufferings, has a 
wider sweep than religion. The religious experience is 
one of the subjects of poetry. Religion is not coextensive 
with poetic utterance. Religious feeling and thought may 
express themselves in manifold ways and by various sym- 
bols. Gothic architecture is one of the supreme expres- 
sions of the northern spirit in religion, the passion for 
the Infinite; just as the Parthenon is the expression of 
that worship of the harmonious and symmetrical Finite 
which was the characteristic of Greek religion. Music, 
in chant and psalm, is another expression of religious 
feeling which in this expression weds words and music 
into one. Painting expresses the objectives of reverence, 
devotion and love; as in the “Sistine Madonna.” 

In the broad sense, all these artistic expressions are 
forms of poetry. What makes religious poetry is the 
expression, in symbols drawn from sensory experience and 
recreated by the creative imagination, of devotion, love, 
communion with the Perfect, in some individualized or 
concreted shape. ‘Thus, too, sacraments are poems—out- 
ward and visible signs or symbols of inward and spiritual 
graces; that is, of feelings of adoration, devotion, com- 
munion. Religion, as an immediate experience of the 
soul is a temper of mind, an attitude of spirit. This 
temper we describe as one blended of aspiration, devotion 
or adoration, love and communion. Forms of worship, 
places and accessories of worship, acts of will, are the 
varied expressions of the religious temper of mind. Paul’s 





POETRY AND RELIGION 239 


great hymn to Christian love in I Corinthians, Chapter 18, 
is a great religious poem. 

“The things which are seen are temporal; the things 
which are unseen are eternal.’”’ The manifold expressions 
of the religious feeling or temper of mind, in poem, hymn, 
chant, sacrament, altar, church, are bodyings forth of the 
unseen spiritual essence which is the heart of religion. 

Poetry is one with religion in so far as it embodies in 
symbols the life of aspiration, devotion, communion and 
love in all its length, breadth and depth; and by its 
symbolic utterance arouses the religious temper of mind. 
The fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, long suffering,, 
meekness, goodness, self-control. 

These fruits are yielded through expression. Their 
powers are enhanced through poetry. Man doth not live 
by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of 
the mouth of the poet. For the poet who selects and 
expresses the abiding values of hfe, who seizes on and 
depicts the deeper meanings of existence, is a creator. 
He is the best mouthpiece of the Cosmic Poet, the World 
Artist. In Wordsworth’s words, “Faith was given to man 
that his affections, detached from the treasures of time, 
might be inclined to settle upon those of eternity: the 
elevation of his nature, which this habit produces on earth, 
being to him a presumptive evidence of a future state of 
existence, and giving him a title to partake of its holi- 
ness. ‘he religious man values what he sees chiefly as 
an ‘imperfect shadowing forth’ of what he is incapable 
of seeing. The concerns of religion refer to indefinite 
objects, and are too weighty for the mind to support them 
without relieving itself by resting a great part of the 
burthen upon words and symbols. The commerce between 


240 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


Man and his Maker cannot be carried on but by a process 
where much is represented in little, and the Infinite Being 
accommodates himself to a finite capacity. In all this may 
be perceived the affinity between religion and poetry; be- 
tween religion—making up the deficiencies of reason by 
faith; and poetry—passionate for the instruction of 
reason; between religion—whose element is infinitude, 
and whose ultimate trust is the supreme of things, sub- 
mitting herself to circumspection, and reconciled to substi- 
tutions; and poetry—ethereal and transcendent, yet in- 
capable to sustain her existence without sensuous 
incarnation.” ® 


3 Essay, Supplementary to the Preface, 1815 Edition of ‘‘ Lyrical 
Ballads.’’ 


CHAPTER XXI 
A CREATIVE UNIVERSE 


The ancient barriers of thought between nature and 
God have been broken down by modern science and phi- 
losophy. Dualistic supernaturalism is, for the modern 
mind, as dead as a doornail. For modern thought the 
cosmos is an infinite and eternal Whole. There are no 
water-tight compartments in it. All its elements are inter- 
related. All the diverse qualities which it displays are 
expressions of its ceaselessly creative and mobile energies. 
It is a dynamic universe. From the single electron, up 
to the whole cosmos of star-systems, everything real is 
active and in movement. The universe is eternally crea- 
tive mobility. Creation is not confined to any moment or 
period in the history of the universe. Creation is an 
eternal process. The history of the universe is an eternal 
history—one which has no absolute beginning or ending. 
This earth, this solar system, these living organisms, have 
had histories. They originated by the creative synthesis 
of the primordial elements of the physical, vital and 
mental orders, They will pass into other forms of finite 
existence. But the new forms, with their new powers 
and their promises of further advance—all the multiform 
novelties and enrichments of the universe—are born from 
the synthesis of preéxisting energies. From the electron 
to the star dust, and from the star dust to the poet, the 

241 


242 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


seer and the scientist, who can read the esthetic, intel- 
lectual and spiritual meanings of the universe, what vast 
forward steps in creation! Creation everywhere and 
always, but no absolute beginnings! 

The physical universe, with its infinitely vast and com- 
plicated movements, its unimaginably variegated dance 
of energies, is the stage and scenic background for the 
display of the more richly creative powers of life. Life 
is @ higher, a more significant, organization of energies, 
than the intra-atomic and interatomic movements of non- 
living things. Life is a richer potency of creation, built 
upon the substructure of physical energies. In the order 
of creative ascent, which is the living garment of the 
Hternal ever being freshly woven into new patterns, there 
are: (1) the wonderful complex of interatomic and intra- 
atomic energies; (2) the higher complex of vital energies, 
and (8) the still higher complex of mental or spiritual 
energies. 

Living beings are self-moving, self-feeding, self-repair- 
ing, self-reproducing. Finally, they are creative of, and 
live by communion with, all forms of beauty, truth, jus- 
tice, love and sacrifice of their lower selfhood. For ex- 
ample, sex love is a higher manifestation of creative cosmic 
energy than chemical or electrical attraction. For from 
sex love spring forth tender emotion, the vision and wor- 
ship of beauty, the power of self-sacrifice for sweetheart 
and child. 

Living beings can rise to the height of the vision and 
the service of spuitual valuwes—to creative imagination 
and worship, through art and science, philosophy and 
religion, in the sanctuary of the personal spirit from which 
man goes out to commune with nature and his fellows, 





5 a oe, an ae 


ee er 


ee 


ee 


a a a ct i a rn 


i 
| 


A CREATIVE UNIVERSE 243 


and to find God in this communion. Thus, in conscious 
life, physical energies acquire a soul and spirit, manifested 
in perception, memory, esthetic feeling, imagination, 
creative intelligence and the higher loves of comradeship, 
fellowship and worship. 

No finer sketch of life’s qualities and deeds has ever 
been drawn than the following: ‘The variety of life— 
thousands and thousands of distinct individualities or 
species; the abundance of life—like a river, always tend- 
ing to overflow its banks; the diffusion of life—exploring 
and exploiting every corner of land and sea; the insur- 
gence of life—self-assertive, persistent, defiant, continu- 
ally achieving the apparently impossible; the cyclical 
development of life—ever passing from birth, through love 
to death; the intricacy of hfe—every drop of blood a 
microcosm; the subtlety of life—every drop of blood an 
index of idiosyncrasies; the interrelatedness of life—with 
myriad threads interwoven into a patterned web; the 
drama of life—plot within plot, age after age, with every 
conceivable illustration of the twin motives of hunger and 
love; the flux of life, even under our short-lived eyes; 
the progress of life—slowly creeping upwards through 
unthinkable time, expressing itself in ever nobler forms; 
the beauty of life—every finished organism an artistic 
harmony; the morality of life—spending itself to the 
death for other than individual ends; the mentality of 
life—sometimes quietly dreaming, sometimes sleep-walk- 
ing, sometimes wide awake; and the victory of life— 
subduing material things and, in its highest reaches, con- 
trolling outside things towards an increasing purport” 
(J. Arthur Thomson, in Encyclopaedia of Religion and 
Ethics). 


244 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


Man is a new stage in the cosmic creative process. In 
him the Infinite Creative Energy has reached a richer 
phase of self-expression than in the animal world—one 
richer in individuality by the possession of the creative 
powers of passion, thought and imagination. In man we 
begin to see somewhat clearly the beauty, the glory and 
the further promise of creative evolution. Consider what 
man has created out of his own immanent energies in 
interaction with the energies of earth and sea and sky— 
languages, tools, societies, morals, political and economic 
systems, forms of beauty and of truth in increasing sweep 
and depth of purport—all the manifold forms and instru- 
ments of human culture, all the humane values and ideals, 
culminating in religion, the vision and the feeling of 
communion with the Perfect, of union in spirit with the 
Spirit of the Whole! But man cannot be the last word 
in creative evolution. Nay, is he not rather the first 
stammering but clearly meaningful expression of the Uni- 
versal Purport? Above man there must be a whole hier- 
archy of higher forms of finite individuality, more 
harmonious and richer selves. And, far ahead of man, 
as he now is, there gleams, along the far vistas of time, 
the beckoning vision of a more nearly perfect humanity, 
the realization of the Divine Sonship, foreglimpsed by 
ancient and modern seers. From man shall come the 
superman—not by brute force, but by a wider sweep of 
imagination, an intenser stirring of love and loyalty, a 
more penetrating concentration of creative intelligence 
and creative vision. Creative love and creative mind, 
fused into one by the white heat of thinker, artist, poet, 
seer and lover, shall give birth to the spiritual superman. 

The stream of evolution cannot rise higher than its 





A CREATIVE UNIVERSE 245 


source. If there be endless creative evolution, there must 
be an infinite fountain of creative life, thought and feel- 
ing. If you ask, where is God in the creative process ? 
the first answer is, everywhere. He is manifest in the 
energy of the electron, in the architecture of the atom, of 
the human brain and of the solar systems. God is the 
infinite and ceaseless formative energy manifested in all 
things. When we look narrowly at this or that particular 
thing, we may not think of God, since our attention is 
riveted on the particularity of the thing. But when we 
consider the relation of this particular being to other be- 
ings, and thus our thoughts are led to the contemplation 
of the Whole, we are led straight up to the notion of the 
creative ground of the whole dynamic order or system. 

Is then God equally present and manifest in all things ? 
By no manner of means. The more richly organized, the 
more individual and comprehensive in meaning, any 
finite being is, the more of the Creative Spirit of the 
Whole does it reveal. God is truly in the electron and 
in the atom. But He is much more adequately revealed 
in “Lord Christ’s heart and Plato’s brain.” ‘His dwell- 
ing is the light of setting suns,” ‘And the round ocean 
and the living air.” He is in “the blue sky and in the 
mind of man.” But there is more of the Divine Spirit’s 
meaning and power in a great human soul than even in 
a sunset. He cannot be less and, indeed, He must be 
much more, than His highest finite manifestations. He 
must be more than the wisest and noblest human person. 
He must be inconceivably richer in qualities than the 
highest soul that we know. He must include and tran- 
scend the spiritual qualities of human personality even 
at its best. God, if He must be more and greater than 


246 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


man, must be conscious. He must think and feel. For 
anything which is conscious and feels is higher than which 
is unconscious and unfeeling. The highest human beings 
are those which have the widest and intensest and most 
harmonious consciousness. ‘Therefore, God is not merely 
the creative Energy and Ground of evolution. He is the 
creative ordering Thought and the all-transfusing, all- 
harmonizing Feeling of the entire cosmos. He is per- 
sonality, but more than personality. If He were but a 
person like ourselves He would be finite and over against 
us—a magnified non-natural man. Beyond our most com- 
prehensive and intensest consciousness of Him must le 
infinite riches of his Being, Life, Thought and Feeling 
blended into one perfect Whole. He can paint and model 
as no human artist can. He can think and image and 
body forth as no human thinker can. God, then, is the 
superpersonal and infinitely creative Spirit of the cosmos 
—at once transcendent of, as He is immanent in, all that 
is finite. Since the highest in us is the capacity to think, 
to love, to worship and to serve the Supreme Values of 
Truth, Beauty and Love incarnate in human experience, 
we may say that we approach nearest to God’s innermost 
being in our fellowship with those human souls who best 
embody and most fully serve the realization of spiritual 
values in human life. And our highest destiny is, by the 
service of spiritual or humane values, to bear our parts, 
however humble and obscure, in God’s creative process, 
by which the cosmos becomes ever richer in centers of 
harmonious feeling, rational insight and power and 
beauty. 





CHAPTER XXIT 
SPIRIT AND THE COSMOS 


All the words for “spirit” in European languages point 
back to the quasi-material thinking which regarded spirit 
as a tenuous and elusive but not immaterial entity; which 
identified spirit with the breath or air in a human being: 
for example, spiritus, anima, psyche, pneuma, thumos, 
ruah, nephesh. 

It took mankind thousands of years to arrive at the 
notion of a supermaterial principle. The supermaterial 
nature of spirit is first explicitly taught by Socrates and 
Plato (we cannot at this distance separate their teach- 
ings). Their word for spirit is most often nous; that is, 
thought and reason. Jeason or spirit is the governing 
principle in man and the cosmos. 

One finds a similar line of development in Hebrew 
thought until Hebrew and Greek thought came together. 
The spirit or heart of man is the essential principle. In 
Hebrew thought more emphasis is laid on feeling and 
less on reason and esthetic balance and harmony than by 
the Greeks. 

The Platonists and Neo-Platonists carried on the work 
of Plato; and the Stoics made use of their thought. Philo 
was a Neo-Platonist, and probably through Philo the 
sharp distinction between the material and animal and 
the spiritual orders passed into the Gospel of John. Who- 

247 


248 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


ever the author was he was deeply imbued with Neo- 
Platonic spiritualism or idealism. The distinction 
between the physical body, the vital principle of 
vegetable and animal life, and the spirit as the principle 
of thought, conscience, the higher sentiments and rational 
will, is found in St. Paul and St. John. This distinction 
was taken over from Neo-Platonic philosophy. It derives 
from Plato’s distinction of the three levels in man—sen- 
suous desire, impulsive vigor and governing thought. 

After this brief historical résumé let us consider now 
the essential meaning of spirit, its relation to personality 
and its place in the cosmos. 

Spirit includes sentiment, thought and volitional atti- 
tude; but it is more than these. When we speak of a 
man’s essential spirit, say he has a fine or brave spirit, 
we mean a unitary, permanent, active power or principle 
that is deeper than his consciousness and is the wellspring 
of his sentiments and active attitudes. Spirit is the super- 
natural power by virtue of which man becomes a per- 
sonality and by which the animal organism is transformed 
into rational, moral and social individuality. Thus spirit 
is the vital principle of personality. 

It is the principle of self-activity, the source of the 
higher sentiments, of intellectual and moral judgment and 
volition and of those imaginative visions and intuitions 
which are the most concrete and rich forms of experience. 

But while spirit is the spring and principle of per- 
sonality, it is more than personal. There cannot be im- 
personal spirit but there is superpersonal spirit. Personal 
spirit is but an individualized resultant of superpersonal 
spirit. 

We all recognize that intangible but real and effective 


SPIRIT AND THE COSMOS 249 


power which makes of a social group an actual social and 
moral being. There is the spirit of a family, a team, a 
school, a college, a community, a church, a people or a 
nation. This communal spirit is not the arithmetical sum 
of the individual spirits which make it up. They depend 
on it for the qualities they show even more than it depends 
on them. The communal spirit is shown in the various 
achievements of its members. It is evoked through lead- 
ership and response. The communal spirit seems engen- 
dered by the interplay of separate individuals, but it is 
far more persistent in the larger groups than in indi- 
viduals. The spirit of a church or nation changes but 
endures. Even the spirit of a college or university may 
be very enduring. Witness Oxford! Many of our Ameri- 
can universities are not real universities since they have 
no common spirit, no soul. They are mechanical aggre- 
gates of departments. The cultural traditions carried on 
by social institutions are the vehicles of the enduring, 
changing, growing spirit of civilization as a whole, and 
of its several constituents. 

In sum, then, spirit is the source of personality, since 
it is the superpersonal principle by which personality 
develops. There is not personality without community. 
It is true that there is no real community without mem- 
bers who are persons; but in terms of comparative value 
and enduring reality the community must have precedence 
of individual personality. 

Apply this to the cosmos. If there be a cosmos or uni- 
verse it must be pervaded by one spirit. To separate 
nature from spirit or spirit in man from the cosmic spirit 
is to rend the universe asunder, to deny that there is a 
cosmos. The more we learn in regard to nature and man 


250 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


the clearer it becomes that they are members of one whole, 
and this whole is eternally creative. It manifests inex- 
haustible energy and vitality. ‘Thus the cosmic spirit 
might be called the Infinite Creative Urge—the inex- 
haustible creative vital energy in the life of which every 
finite center of energy, however humble and transitory, 
is a fragmentary event. The whole universe is the body 
of the cosmic spirit; every individual in the universe is 
a cell or part of a cell in the cosmic body. Since all 
the multitudinous and various finite individuals or 
monadic forms of existence are interdependent; since the 
endless creative life of the universe is the story, ever being 
freshly written, of the ceaseless interplay of the finite 
monads, and this story is a continuous and intelligible 
order including in its indefinite diversity many lesser 
others, the cosmic spirit, working ever at the roaring loom 
of time (time is but the form of his ceaseless working), 
weaves a patterned fabric whose design bit by bit we 
puzzle out. The whole design we do not know. There- 
fore, the cosmic spirit or life urge is creative cosmic 
intelligence or thought. This creative thought is the life- 
urge—the world soul. It is manifested in all things, but 
in different degrees of individual fullness. The cosmic 
spirit is manifest in the macrocosmic and microcosmi¢ 
physical energies, in the electrons and the solar systems; 
it is more fully manifest in the living organisms; even 
more fully in the whole panorama of vital evolution; even 
yet more fully in man, who is the most many-sided and 
macrocosmic concentration and unification of the cosmic 
energies. The manifestation of the Cosmic Spirit in- 
creases in comprehensiveness and depth and organization 
of individuality from the electron and the physical cosmos 


SPIRIT AND THE COSMOS 251 


to the highest type of man and of the human community. 
There is no reason to deny, and good reason to suppose, 
that beyond the human community the mounting ladder 
of finite individuations of the cosmic spirit rises into 
richer and nobler forms of being. 
Personality-in-community is the most comprehensive, 
most concrete and most worthful expression of the cosmic 
spirit that we know. Can we say that the cosmic spirit 
is a person? Not as I am a person. For I am a very 
imperfect and dependent spirit. I am dependent on my 
physical and social environments. JI am only in very 
small degree a creative center. I am very incompletely 
socialized and rationalized. Nevertheless, when I con- 
sider that which is of most worth in my personality, I find 
the best analogy because the widest and fullest, for inter- 
preting the nature of cosmic spirit. For organic fila- 
ments from within me reach out and touch the organic 
filaments of life and spirit that stream through the cos- 
mos. I can be one in spirit with the stars in their courses, 
one with the misty mountain winds and the eternal snows, 
one with the unplumbed salt estranging seas, one with the 
meanest flower that blows; one with Orion and the Pleia- 
des, with Betelgeuse and the electron. The more a per- 
sonality I am the more I feel and live in oneness with 
my fellows; one in sympathy and insight, one in suffer- 
ing and joy, in heroic endeavor and quiet contemplation. 
The human self, as it becomes more of a person, reaches 
this destiny by reverent communion with that which is 
below it—physical and animal nature; with that which 
is around it—human nature; with that which is above 
it—cosmic spirit manifest in the creative sweep, the mani- 
fold and concrete wealth of individualities all compacted 


252 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


into order and beauty, the grandeur and the sublimity of 
the Cosmos. 

Certainly God is not a person as I am a person. The 
Cosmic Spirit is not an individual over against other 
individuals, not a magnified non-natural man sitting out- 
side nature and humanity and entering into commerce 
with them. In Him we and all things live and move 
and have our being. In us and all things He lives and 
moves and manifests His being. But, since personality 
in community (and there is, I repeat, no personality with- 
out community) is at once and by virtue of the same 
nature, the most intensely concentrated and unified, the 
richest and the most universal and wide-embracing ex- 
pression of the universal life, we are justified in saying 
that, while God, the Cosmic Spirit, must transcend all 
that we can know or imagine Him to be, nevertheless, in 
the communal spirit of a society of persons we find the 
most adequate expression of His nature. He is not a self 
shut out by other selves. He is the cosmic spirit of which 
interpersonal community is, for us, the most worthy 
adumbration. At best we have only pictures, symbols; 
but it were foolish to take anything less than the richest 
symbol to interpret the meaning of the cosmos. 

Is this Pantheism? Yes and no. It is Pantheism in 
the sense that no chasm can be admitted between God 
and the world; neither between God and nature or God 
andman. Nature and humanity are members of a whole; 
interdependent factors in the cosmos. Nature and man 
taken together are the only revelations we have of the 
cosmic life. God is immanent in the whole process or 
He is nothing. What, then, of His transcendence? Cer- 
tainly there is a truth in the doctrine of transcendence. 








SPIRIT AND THE COSMOS 253 


It is this: We must, in reverent agnosticism, acknowledge 
that there are higher reaches of being, fuller worths and 
deeper meanings in the total cosmos than we know or can 
realize in our experiences. 

The best name for our view is Panentheism, which 
means that all finite beings are in or dependent on God 
and not that God simply exists distributively in all finite 
beings. Pantheism has two great defects: (1) It tends 
towards a slurring of differences of meaning and value 
in the finite; especially it tends towards the slurring of 
moral and spiritual distinctions. (2) It tends towards 
conceiving God as a mere collective name for the sum of 
finite beings. 

We are dependent members of the whole. The whole 
must transcend us. What of evil, then? It is imperfec- 
tion, defect of insight and defect of will or spiritual 
energy, an inevitable incident of development or growth 
in a creative and living universe of finite beings. We 
must recognize that, so far as it is remediable by our 
efforts, we grow in mental and spiritual stature just by 
remedying it. So far as it is irremediable, we grow in 
spiritual stature and strength by accepting the inevitable 
order of things. 

The only real alternative to this attitude is to cut the 
cosmos in pieces and set up a finite God over against an 
irrational or demonic evil principle. Not only does the 
latter solution violate the human impulse toward depend- 
ence on a stable and total order. It has neither practical 
nor religious value. For, if the universe be not a uni- 
verse but a duoverse or multiverse, then we have nothing 
stable to lean on. We shift the entire weight of the. 
universe to human shoulders. That is too much of 2, 


254 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


burden. We all need moral holidays a-plenty. Further- 
more, dualism is not consistent with the fact that, by 
every step we make in science, we learn more of the inter- 
dependence of the elements of reality, we see a bit more 
of the design of the cosmic weaver. 

A Creative Cosmic Spirit in whom is neither variable- 
ness nor shadow of turning, but who ever works in and 
through all finite forms of energy and life—such is the 
belief that, in harmony with science and with the esthetic 
and the religious sense, affords a veritable metaphysical 
basis for human energy, courage and repose; “underneath 
are the everlasting arms.” 





CHAPTER XXTIT 
MATTER AND SPIRIT 


The most crucial problem for theology and metaphysics 
is the matter-spirit or mind-body problem. I prefer to 
state it as the problem of the ultimate relation of matter 
and spirit for two reasons: (1) The living body is a 
special case of material organization. (2) For theology 
and religion the special interest of this problem hes in 
the nature of spirit rather than of mind. Mind is a more 
inclusive, broader and vaguer reality than spirit. There 
is the “mind of the flesh,” as Paul put it, or the vegetative 
and sensuous mind, as Aristotle put it; and there is the 
“mind of the spirit,” or the mind which is the seat or 
power of thought, the higher imagination and feelings, 
moral volition, and, in short, of all the activities, experi- 
ences and deeds which make up the life of spiritual values. 
True religion has no concern for the place and fate of 
the merely vegetative and sensuous mind. If the spirit- 
ual mind be the mere transitory by-product and plaything 
of matter, then religion is an illusion. Therefore, the 
most critical problem for religion is this: does modern 
thought compel us, if we are desirous of being rational 
in our view of the universe, to admit that all things spir- 
itual are nothing more than chemically analyzable secre- 
tions of the physical body? If we are constrained to give 

255 


256 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


an affirmative answer to this question, then all religion 
is an exploded superstitition. 

There are three chief attempts at an answer to this 
problem: (1) Materialism or mechanistic metaphysics. 
(2) Sporitualism, often misleadingly called Idealism. (3) 
The theory that Matter and Spirit are both real and 
organically interdependent factors in the universe. It 
is difficult to give this last theory a short name. It has 
been called Dualism, but, to me, Dualism has so many 
misleading implications that I prefer not to use the term. 

There are some very strong arguments for materialism. 
Man’s spiritual powers do seem to depend for their nor- 
mal functioning on the normal functioning of the 
central nervous system. This system, in turn, depends 
for its normal functioning on the proper action of the 
digestive, circulatory and glandular systems. I need not 
do more here than refer to the mass of evidence that has 
been accumulated on this score. Furthermore, when one 
considers how utterly indifferent the forces of material 
nature, operating on the large scale in our universe, seem 
to be towards the well-being and survival of spiritual 
values, it is difficult to believe that the cosmos exhibits 
any real concern for the fate of spirit. Omnipotent mat- 
ter seems to crash along, blind and insensible to all that 
gives meaning and value, worth and dignity, to human 
life. The physical forces undergo their ceaseless proc- 
esses of transformation, combine, dissolve and recombine 
endlessly; in their blind and inevitable march they occa- 
sionally throw up those transitory phosphorescences— 
beauty, friendship, love, heroism, truth, purity and self- 
sacrifice—which we call spiritual values. But in a mo- 
ment, in the twinkling of an eye, these values are engulfed, 





MATTER AND SPIRIT 257 


with the beings who cherish them, in the abysmal whirl- 
pools of insensate material movement. Philosophical 
humanists have often drawn terrific indictments of na- 
ture’s cruelty and indifference to spiritual values. If the 
sum of things be purely material it cannot be cruel, since 
only a being who can think and feel can be cruel. The 
materialist who charges nature with cruelty is guilty of 
the pathetic fallacy of attributing his own feelings to that 
which cannot feel. 

Against the above considerations one may set others 
that seriously weaken the case for materialism. How can 
a merely brutal and insensible and unintelligent universe 
have given birth to such strange progeny as loving, intelli- 
gent, heroic, creative spirits? How can “omnipotent 
matter” have produced so much that is not only superior 
to itself, but so different in character from itself? The 
entire works of human culture—all the arts, moral and 
social systems, sciences, religions and philosophies—are 
prima facie evidences of the creative power of spirit, a 
power which operates on a plane and in a manner quite 
different from merely material forces. The whole history 
of human culture is an insoluble enigma to the materialist. 
Moreover, in the human individual, it is no less true 
that spirit influences the body immediately connected 
with it, in this way influencing other spirits, than it is 
true that body influences spirit. Our beliefs, our hopes, 
our fears, our longings, our resolves, our choices—all in- 
fluence first our own bodies and then our surroundings. 
It is more plausible to argue that the bodily ills which 
derange the spirit and which may seem to extinguish it 
are due to defects in the instrument for the spirit’s expres- 
sion than it is to assert roundly that all things spiritual 


258 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


are mere by-products of the material body. There is evi- 
dence a-plenty in the lives of human individuals and in 
the whole of social culture for the doctrine that mental 
and spiritual powers really exist and are effective factors. 

Spiritualism is the extreme opposite, the logical con- 
tradictory, of Materialism. The spiritualist argues that 
we can have no knowledge of any material forces, since 
all our knowledge is derived from ideas or percepts. This 
argument is a clever quibble. I can no more perceive 
directly a unitary and self-active spirit than I can per- 
ceive directly an electron in movement around a nucleus. 
In both cases I infer the reality that is not perceived as 
being the best hypothesis to account for the perceived facts. 
The spiritualist is invited to explain why the phenomena, 
or empirical behaviors of minds and nonmental bodies, 
should appear to be so different in character, if rocks, 
electricity, wind, rain, etec., are but ways in which other 
minds impinge upon our minds. It is impossible to un- 
derstand, or even to imagine, why my body should be 
different from my mind as I know the latter, or why your 
body should be felt differently by you and by me if both 
bodies are nothing but “ideas.” The arguments of Berke- 
ley and his kin are acute but unconvincing and raise more 
problems than they lay. 

We must admit, then, as the best hypothesis, that ma- 
terial forces and spiritual forces are both real, and that 
the problem of their ultimate relationship is one to which 
we can offer no satisfactory solution. We must, at pres- 
ent, be content to formulate the relation as a fact of the 
real nature of which we are almost entirely ignorant. In 
short, I do not know how matter and spirit interact, but 
I believe that it is most reasonable, in the face of the 











MATTER AND SPIRIT 259 


facts, to say that they are both real and that they influ- 
ence one another. Our inability to formulate a complete 
and wholly perspicuous theory of the interdependence of 
matter and spirit does not in the least render foolish a 
doctrine which is a generalization from facts; or, rather, 
a general statement of fact. Materialism is not science; 
it is a very crude and lopsided metaphysics, Spiritual- 
ism is not quite so crude a metaphysics, but it is equally 
lopsided. Our point of view is a genuine empiricism, 
since we hold to the facts. 

The hypothesis which is fairest to all the facts is the 
following: The universe of reality, taken as a whole, is 
neither lifeless matter in motion, nor is it dematerialized 
nonspatial spirit. The whole of reality is a living sys- 
tem which includes many degrees or grades of individual 
beings, from the ultramicroscopic cosmos of the atoms up 
to rational persons and, presumably, to higher selves than 
any persons we know. We may speak of unorganized 
or lifeless matter, in the sense that the elemental constitu- 
ents of empirical matter are devoid of the properties of 
living organisms—do not feel or will, do not repair them- 
selves nor reproduce themselves as do living organisms. 
But we must remember that the ultimate constituents of 
the material world are dynamic and have some degree of 
individuality. Moreover, nonliving matter forms the 
positive substructure of living organisms. Life emerges 
and manifests its specific modes of behavior on the foun- 
dation of a specific organization of dynamic material 
particles. It is questionable whether one should think 
of lifeless matter as being more than an abstraction from 
reality. Mind, in animals and men, emerges and func- 
tions in specific ways on the basis of a specific organiza- 


260 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


tion of nerve cells and fibers. Spirit in the sense of 
rational, moral and esthetically endowed personality, is 
the actualization of the highest potencies of mind. 
Therefore, mind and spirit are so intimately associated 
with a spatial and material substructure that we should 
not speak of matter as unspiritual nor of spirit as exist- 
ing apart from matter. The bodily substructure of spirit 
is subtler and more complex the finer the spirit is. In 
the broad sense of the terms, there are no disembodied 
ghosts and no lifeless material. The whole universe 1s 
shot through with the qualities of spirit. Nature as a 
whole is the complete interpenetration of matter and 
spirit. 

Even God, the Universal Spirit, must have a body— 
the spatial and dynamic material Cosmos. There is an 
ascending hierarchy of individuals. These are all mem- 
bers one of another, in the sense that there is no indi- 
viduation of the Universal Energy that is not related to 
all the others. The whole is living and spiritual. There 
are very significant differences, in power, meaning and 
value, in the individual members of the cosmic whole. 
We have not explained away a mind, in terms of matter, 
when we have found out the chemical and subatomic struc- 
ture of the body in which it lives and moves and has its 
being. We have not reduced a living organism to an 
assemblage of dead matter, when we have stated its physi- 
cal structure. The universe as a whole is indefinitely 
rich in the complication and organization of its qualities 
into individual members of the whole. 

We must abandon the dualism which sets over against 
one another as incommunicable and unrelated opposites— 
mind and body, matter and spirit, God and Nature, The 





MATTER AND SPIRIT 261 


whole of nature is the living garment of spirit or mind. 
The structures and relations which we are able slowly to 
spell out by science are parts of the patterned web of this 
living garment. With the microscope, the micrometer 
scale, the diffraction grating, the telescope; in short, with 
all the instrumentalities of science, we are tracing out 
bit by bit the lineaments of spirit in nature. There is 
no antagonism, but rather complementation and interplay, 
between the traces of God’s life and energizing power in 
nature and in the heart, the conscience and the will of 
man. Spirit is manifested throughout the natural order. 
It is more concretely, intimately and immediately known 
in human feeling—in love, devotion, sympathy, sacrifice 
and service. But there is no antagonism between these 
twin revelations. For the supernature which is thought, 
will and love is a part of nature, when we mean by nature 
the world-whole, the unceasing utterance of the Creative 
Spirit of God. 

Thus, in the name of science and philosophy, we must 
reject a dualism which would sunder matter and spirit, 
Nature and God, and make it forever impossible to under- 
stand how spirit can enter into matter, how God can enter 
into a world which is external to and over against him; 
and still more impossible to understand, how spirit can 
exist without physical habiliments, or how God can live 
and energize without a cosmos to express that universal 
living and creative Energy which He is. 

In this deepest of all philosophical issues the facts seem 
to be as follows (I am making a very summary statement 
of an immense range of facts): Certain forms of matter 
constitute the positive potentiality of vital organization. 
Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus are 


262 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


themselves doubtless the results of certain specific arrange- 
ments of electrons. Given a suitable arrangement of these 
elements in a fitting environment and life arises. No one 
knows how life arises. When the living organism has 
reached a specific degree of organization it becomes sen- 
tient. No one knows with certainty whether nerve cells 
organized into a system are necessary for the manifesta- 
tion of consciousness. It is highly probable that such is 
the case. Certain highly organized and sensitized organ- 
isms become the organs of thought, imagination and moral 
volition. These are spiritualized material organisms. We 
know nothing, empirically, of disembodied spirits. On 
the other hand, the evolutionary materialist who claims 
that he is scientific in asserting that the spiritual qualities 
of men are nothing but the summations of the movements 
of purely physical particles is talking arrant dogmatism. 
He is not talking science at all. He is putting up a meta- 
physical bluff. It is not science to say that spirit is a 
by-product of matter. It is not science to say that life 
is only a special case of material arrangement. There are 
several big jumps, as well as many little steps, in the 
evolutionary ascent or descent. It is just as bad logic to 
say that the big jumps are made up of a lot of minute 
steps, of steps so minute as not to be steps at all but 
erawls, as it would be to say that an athlete breaks the 
record for the high jump by adding together more little 
jumps so small as to be unnoticeable than his competitors. 
The evolutionary materialist makes his case plausible by 
taking all the time there is and then adding more to cover 
up the jumps by making them smaller and smaller until 
the differences between organisms seem to disappear. 
When he has, by skillful use of millennium upon millen- 





MATTER AND SPIRIT 263 


nium, obliterated from view the differences between or- 
ganisms, the next step is easy—to obliterate the distinc- 
tion between living and nonliving bodies, But all this is 
not science. It is very bad metaphysics. Probably, as a 
generalized statement of the history of life, the evolution- 
ary hypothesis is the best we have. It is in harmony with 
a multitude of facts. But it conceals many unsolved 
problems—notably the problem of discontinuity or nov- 
elty, that is of the jumps in the structure of the empirical 
world. The biggest of these jumps are the jump from 
nonliving to living matter and the jump from sensuous 
mind to reasoning spirit. Man is not a disembodied 
spirit; but that he is a spirit and not a mere animal 
organism must be evident to any one who will compare 
the achievements, sufferings, troubles, aims and ideals of 
man in civilization with the work of the anthropoid ape. 
It is scientific since it is in accord with the facts to believe 
that man is a responsible and rational spirit, a being of 
large discourse, capable of looking before and after. It 
is unscientific to shut one’s eyes to the cultural and moral 
phenomena of human life which bear witness to the reality 
of spirit, and to deny its existence simply in the interests 
of a dogmatic metaphysics masquerading in the name of 
science. 

The theory of evolution is simply the best description 
and interpretation of a great body of facts. It is not by 
any means a final and complete explanation of these facts. 
In particular, the theory of evolution gives no explana- 
tion of the following facts: (1) That the original organi- 
zation of the material universe, the distribution of its 
elements, was such as to enable life to appear and develop 
in manifold forms. (2) The origin of life itself is not 


264 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


explained. Even if it be admitted that life is just the 
result of a special configuration of certain chemical ele- 
ments it is not thereby explained away. This specific 
complex is the physical basis of life. It cannot be re- 
garded as lifeless matter. (3) The theory of evolution 
has, as yet, given no satisfactory explanation of the causes 
of the indefinite variability of living matter which has 
resulted in all the novelties we find in the kingdom of 
organisms. Nor has it yet offered a satisfactory explana- 
tion of how variations are transmitted and thus enhanced. 
(4) It has not offered and it cannot offer, any causal 
explanation of the origin of consciousness, of feeling, ra- 
tional thought, creative imagination, spiritual vision and 
moral conscience. Therefore, it fails to explain the causes 
of the whole work of human culture.. 

Nothing is gained and much truth is obscured by oblit- 
erating differences. Man is akin to the lower organisms. 
But he is also very different from all other organisms. 
His whole career and works on earth prove this cardinal 
fact—the uniqueness of man. Man is what he is and he 
will become what he has power to become, entirely regard- 
less of whether he was created in a moment in the twin- 
kling of an eye, on the first Saturday 4004 B.C., or 
first appeared as a low-browed apelike savage 500,000 
years ago trailing a long ancestry with him. 

The theory of evolution sheds light on the question why 
man is so easily beset by fears, superstitions, lusts and 
greeds; why he is so little of an angel. It enables us to 
discard the notion that man’s weakness and brutishness 
are the consequence of Adam’s sin. But it does not in 
the least detract from the beauty and value of man’s spir- 
itual nature. It does not mar the sublimity of his thought, 





MATTER AND SPIRIT 265 


his higher affections, his visions, his aspirations and his 
heroisms. 

Man remains, from the evolutionary standpoint a para- 
doxical being mingled of clay and spirit, his feet in the 
mire, his mind and heart ascending to the stars. 

If spirit be a unique kind of creative and intelligent 
power, even though it be here and now associated with 
certain forms of matter, it may well be capable of associa- 
tion with other forms of matter, with forms more plastic 
to the aims of spirit. If spirit be a unique power or force, 
even the darkest and most shocking cases of the apparent 
obscuration or extinction of the spirit by the operation of 
material forces do not shut us out from the right to 
believe in the endurance and ultimate victory of spirit. 
We are apt to be imposed upon unduly in these matters 
by very striking or large-scale happenings. The Japanese 
disaster appalls us, but it raises no new problem. The 
insanity or extinction of a brilliant spirit appalls one, but 
it, too, raises no new problem. The differences between 
such cases and more ordinary experiences are differences 
of degree. It is very difficult to believe that spiritual 
things are supreme or ever will become supreme in the 
universe. But the most inexpugnable ground for this 
faith, appearance to the contrary notwithstanding, is the 
undying urge in man which prevents him from falling 
back on what has been or even being satisfied with what, 
whichever pricks him on to create and recreate works of 
culture to slake the undying thirst of his spirit for more 
life and fuller. 

And it is scarcely credible that this most unique, most 
creative and most insistent force in the world—the spirit 
as manifested in man—should not be akin to that which 


266 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


is highest, most creative and most enduring in the uni- 
verse. As in man, so in the universe. The body is the 
instrument and expression of the spirit. The order and 
beauty, the sublimity and unhasting but unresting crea- 
tive life of the universe are the vesture or expression of 
the Universal Spirit. The physical Cosmos is the body 
of God. It would be carrying coals to Newcastle for me 
to repeat here the magnificent imagery of the prophets 
and the psalmists in which there is expressed for all time 
on this earth the doctrine for which I have been arguing. 


Nors. It will be obvious to the thoughtful reader that the 
present writer’s standpoint in philosophy is dynamic idealism. 
The universe is a dynamic and living system or an eternally cre- 
ative order, of which the most adequate expression or realization 
is found in the community of personal spirits. This is the proper 
meaning of idealism, inasmuch as, ever since Plato, it has meant 
the doctrine that the ideal principles concreted in the human 
world in the various forms of rational insight, volitional harmony 
and aesthetic and affectional-communion are the controlling prin- 
ciples of reality. 





CHAPTER XXIV 
THE IDEA OF GOD 


There are two ways of approach to the Idea of God— 
the profoundest, most difficult and most important con- 
cept that man forms. One may approach the God idea 
from the consideration of the natural cosmos, or from the 
consideration of human personality. Of course these two 
ways must ultimately come together. or, on the one 
hand, the concept of the natural cosmos is a concept 
formed by man from reflection upon the data of human 
experience in its totality. And, on the other hand, human 
personality is developed and lives only in interaction with 
nature. Man is a dependent member of the natural cos- 
mos. All the movements and forces of the universe meet 
in him, and yet he judges and appraises the cosmos. He 
wills in harmony with its movement. At times he strug- 
gles against it. Although he seems but a broken reed 
shaken by every wind of nature, he is, as Pascal put it, 
a thinking reed and thus far he is greater than nature. 
In primitive thought there is no clear distinction drawn 
between the natural world and the realm of man. Nature 
is held to be governed, in all her movements, by manlike 
spirits. In animistic and polytheistic thinking there is 
no more order recognized in nature than in human nature. 
The increasing recognition of order in nature marches 
step by step with the growth of order in human social 

267 


268 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


relations, and in the highest reaches of human thought 
these two orders keep pace together. The order of the 
starry heavens is complementary to the order of the moral 
law. 

As man becomes more self-conscious, more clearly aware 
of his own nature and of the interests and goods which 
belong to human self-realization, he tends to conceive the 
natural cosmos as subservient to the highest Values. 
Thus, in ancient Greece the philosophers looked upon 
nature as a rational and esthetic order which is the expres- 
sion of the same principles that are for them supreme in 
human life. Nature is what she is, she becomes what 
she becomes, through the power of these Forms or 
Rational Principles and Aesthetic and Moral Values, 
participation in which, for Plato and Aristotle, was the 
highest destiny of the human soul. 

The Hebrew seers, who thought in more imaginative 
and concrete terms, conceived God as a Righteous Per- 
sonal Will who creates and rules nature as well as man. 
“The Heavens declare his power.” “The firmament 
showeth his handiwork.” “Heaven is His throne, the 
earth his footstool.” “He forms the light and creates 
darkness.” ‘He rides upon the wings of the wind.” 

In the magnificent imagery of prophet and psalmist 
God is pictured as the absolute and holy creative and 
governing Will. Nature is the subordinate expression and 
the subservient instrument of that will. But the highest, 
the most characteristic expression of the Divine Will is 
to be found in the moral-social life of man. “What doth 
Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love kind- 
ness, and to walk humbly with thy God?’ Micah vi: 8. 
‘““Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your 





I ee Te me a | Ee ee Ma a ace 


THE IDEA OF GOD 269 


doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to 
do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the 
fatherless, plead for the widow.” Isaiah i: 16,17. ‘And 
he will judge between the nations and will decide con- 
cerning many peoples.” Isaiah 11:4. ‘Seek good and 
not evil, that ye may live. . . . Hate the evil and love 
the good, and establish justice in the gate.” Amos v: 14, 
15. “But let justice roll down as waters, and righteous- 
ness as a mighty stream.” Amos v: 24. 

The Hebrew prophets depict the order of nature as the 
manifestation of God’s glory and power but as entirely 
subsidiary to his holy and merciful Will, which is re- 
vealed in his dealings with mankind. They have no 
thought of any invariant order of causation in the course 
of nature. God may at any moment, for a moral purpose, 
arrest and change that course. 

The modern scientific conception of nature excludes 
the notion that God intervenes on special occasions and 
in preéminent degrees in the orderly process of natural 
events. The whole order of nature is the continuous ex- 
pression of the divine purposive Energy or Will. God 
does not suspend that order. The only God for modern 
science is the World-Soul, the immanent spirit or order 
of nature (the World-Soul of the Stoics, the Deus swe 
Natura of Spinoza). In this respect the scientific con- 
ception of nature is incompatible with the Hebrew and 
Christian notion that the energies and events of nature 
are more or less arbitrary expressions of a divine will 
that is beyond them and that can abolish them, as it has 
set them up and keeps them going, for its own good 
pleasure. 

The only notion of God that is compatible with the 


270 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


principles and postulates of a scientific conception of na- 
ture is that of an immanent principle of Life, Order, 
Intelligence, continuously manifesting itself in the course 
of nature. This does not mean that God is limited by 
what we actually know of nature. He is not in the natural 
process, as though His life were cribbed, cabined and con- 
fined by the laws of the behavior of material energy, or 
vital energy. Nature isin Him. Nature is the continu- 
ous expression of an Orderly Power. The laws or rules 
of nature’s behavior are the coherent and persistent lan- 
guage of the universal Logos, the World-Reason, 

But this immanental conception does not imply that 
God is equally manifested in all forms of finite existence. 
The lower forms of life are fuller manifestations of his 
Creative Energy than nonliving things. The higher forms 


of conscious life are more adequate expressions of his | 


nature than the lower. There is more of God in Man 
than in a manlike ape, more of God in a saint or great 
creative artist or thinker than in an ordinary man. God’s 
self-manifestation in nature, including human nature, is 
an ascent, a hierarchy, a graded series of steps of self- 
revelation. 

But nature seems cruel, harsh, insensible to human 
suffering, indifferent to human good and evil. So men 
have been led from of old time to conceive God as a 
finite being, struggling to promote the good against 
external hindrances; against personal devils or impersonal 
brute matter. The line of thinkers who have taken such 
a view, from Zoroaster to William James and H. G. Wells, 
is a long and highly reputable one. 

Nevertheless, the doctrine of a finite or limited God 
defeats the end for which men conceive and believe in 





THE IDEA OF GOD 271 


God. The ideal aim of science is a complete description 
of all the elemental features of nature in their interde- 
pendencies as parts of one all-inclusive order. It would 
conceive the entire sequence of events as involving the 
complete and continuous determination of each phase by 
the preceding phase, and of each future phase as neces- 
sarily issuing from the present phase. A universe con- 
sisting, at any instant in its history, of a system of recipro- 
cally determining elements; and consisting, at each suc- 
cessive instant, of a temporal phase of that system as 
inevitably issuing from its previous phase—such is the 
world-view implied in the postulates of science. The 
history of the universe is an endless history—without be- 
ginning or ending—of causally interdependent events. 
Science has no use for the conception of a First Cause, 
existing antecedently to the creation of the natural cosmos 
and continuing to exist outside the cosmos which he has 
created. The only conception of God’s relation to nature 
that is in harmony with the principles of science is that 
He is the eternally energizing power or spirit who, by 
the inherent necessity of his nature as self-expressive and 
self-revelatory, eternally creates and sustains the world 
of nature. And the eternal conservation of the world is 
the act of continuous creation. God cannot will, by an 
inscrutable fiat, to make a world, and then later will with 
equal inscrutability to intervene, to remake or improve 
it, and then perhaps still later decide to abolish it alto- 
gether. There can be nothing capricious in his will. 
Moreover, a living energizing God eternally implies a 
world of nature. His eternity is not timelessness, but a 
continuous creative energizing through all time. He is 
not “above” or “beyond” the temporal world order. He 


272 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


endures through it, or, rather, it endures through Him. 

Now, as we saw in the previous chapters, the universe 
is creative movement. While science implies unity, con- 
tinuity, a coherent and systematic whole in the universe, 
it does not imply that all parts of the universe are on 
the same level of value and reality. God’s self-expression 
in nature is an ascent in meaning, in wmdwwiduality, in 
value. Nonliving matter and energy do not account for 
living organisms. The principles of merely organic life 
do not account for mind, for reason, for moral conscience, 
for the sense of beauty. God’s self-expression is cumu- 
lative and it reaches its highest pitch (so far as we know) 
in spiritual personality. God’s creative power and his 
character are most fully revealed in spiritual individuals 
—in persons who not only feel and think and act; but 
who feel, think and act rationally, consistently, harmoni- 
ously in the service of the spiritual values possible of 
achievement by man. 

Thus the continuity and order in nature is not at all 
on a dead level. It is creative continuity. It is energy 
and life ever ascending step by step towards greater com- 
prehensiveness, depth, and harmony of conscious rational 
and moral life. Those who say that man’s spiritual life 
is an excrescence, a homeless waif in the cosmos, are in- 
vited to explain how the cosmos has engendered such an 
inexplicable and self-contradictory phenomenon. 

God is then the creative and sustaining Ground of a 
living universe, which issues in spirit and personality. 
The evolution of life must have its Ground in a Being 
who transcends every stage we know in the march of life 
—who transcends even the highest reach of human per- 
sonality. 





THE IDEA OF GOD 273 


God transcends Nature and Man, not by being outside 
of, or beyond, or behind nature and man. He reveals 
Himself by expressing his creative meaning step by step 
in ever richer degree moving towards perfection—in the 
starry heavens, the majestic march of solar systems, the 
equally majestic march of the electrons, the whole spec- 
tacle of infrahuman life, the whole history of man, and 
in the individual soul. 

But, beyond the fragment of the cosmos whose char- 
acteristics and laws we know by perception, inference and 
imagination, beyond all the solar systems, and beyond 
His highest and loveliest revelation in the beauty and 
nobility of human personalities, beyond all human culture, 
there live still further undreamt of riches in the infinite 
plenitude of His Being. God transcends nature in man’s 
moral and rational and esthetic life. He must transcend, 
in the qualitative richness and harmonious comprehensive- 
ness of His Being, all we know and even all we dimly 
feel. 

He is the ever-immanent creative source of the finite 
personality and its environment, just because He is the 
transcendent ground of all Being. He must be the 
Transcendent Ground, since he is ever pouring forth the 
riches of his creative meaning, in life upon life, world-age 
upon world-age. 

Thus, in place of the older, separate arguments for 
God as the Creative Ground of Nature and Humanity we 
have one argument. The ontological argument was that 
the idea of a Perfect Being necessarily implies the exist- 
ence of such a being, since to add existence to all other 
attributes of an idea is to increase its perfection; and 
therefore the idea of God minus existence is not the idea 


274 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


of a Perfect Being. This argument does not prove the 
existence of a loving, a good, or even an intelligent Su- 
preme Being. The truth in it is that when one thinks 
out what is implied in the existence of the finite one is 
inevitably lead to the conception of the whole and self- 
complete. The existence and continuance of the imper- 
fect, with its ascent towards a greater measure of per- 
fection, does imply a Perfect Reality of some sort which 
realizes itself by self-expression in the successive grada- 
tions of the Imperfect. The idea of gradations in the 
Imperfect implies the recognition, however vague, of the 
Perfect. 

The cosmological argument is that the existence of an 
orderly universe implies the reality of a Cause or ground 
of the whole order. It does; but not in the sense of an 
extramundane cause or divine mechanic; not even neces- 
sarily a theistically conceived transcendent Personal 
Ground. 

The teleological argument is that the adaptation of the 
various parts of the world implies a purposive designing 
Intelligence. Against this argument, which has usually 
proceeded on a narrow humanistic bias, have been cited 
the imperfections, wastes, failures, maladaptations, in 
nature and in human life. In the form which implies 
that everything was created and arranged to satisfy the 
appetites and wants of the human animal, this argument 
is well-nigh worthless. But there is creativeness, there is 
an increasing evidence of creative order and meaning in 
the stages of the evolutionary ascent. If the meaning of 
the universe includes, and even transcends, the origina- 
tion and growth of spiritual individuality or personality, 
as it seems to, then the argument is valid. But this 





THE IDEA OF GOD 275 


means, not that the world is an oyster for the human 
animal to open and regale himself with; it means that, 
through all the imperfection, struggle, suffering and 
failure of the world-process runs the meaning and goal 
of more nearly perfect spiritual individuality and com- 
munity as its true end. Man does not exist, then, to hold 
what he is and has. He does not exist to mark time and 
maintain his foothold as an animal. If this is the end 
and value of human life, if an egoistic or even a collecti- 
vistic hedonism (the good as pleasure, satisfaction or 
agreeable feeling) is the key to the value of humankind, 
the universe indeed mocks and thwarts it at nearly every 
turn. But, if the true value of human life consists in 
man’s ever passing beyond what he has attained, in striv- 
ing, serving and loving, in living in and for the spiritual 
goods of integrity, truth, beauty, justice, fellowship, the 
course of nature pricks him on to this destiny by which 
he becomes a son of the Most High. The teleological 
argument means this: 
All tended to mankind 
And, man produced, all has its end thus far! 


But in completed man begins anew 
A tendency to God!? 


The creating and perfecting of personal spirits is the 
meaning of the universal order. Every human being, as 
a potential Son of God, is begotten not made, is of one 
nature with the Father. ‘The Divine and the Human 
are not two separate natures that do not mingle. The 
divine is the spiritual potency of the human. Disinter- 
ested thought, love of beauty and truth, devotion to justice 


1 Browning, Paracelsus. 


276 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


and rationality and fellowship; in short, dedication of 
the self to the furtherance in mankind of the common- 
wealth of rational and free ethical persons, is the divine 
in man. 

“The eternal contrast between the actual and the ideal 
seems to me to furnish the natural key to the problem 
of immanence and transcendence. Transcendence does 
not mean remoteness or aloofness. The distinction it 
points to is that between the perfect and the imperfect; 
and by perfection we do not understand the possession of 
innumerable unknown attributes, but the perfect realiza- 
tion of those very values which we recognize as the glory 
and crown of our human nature. This idea of perfection 
disclosing its features gradually, as men become able to 
apprehend the vision, is the immanent God, the inspiring 
Spirit to whom all progress is due. But the immanent 
God is thus always the infinitely transcendent. ‘The two 
aspects imply one another. A purely immanental theory 
means the denial of the divine altogether as in any way 
distinguishable from the human, and involves, therefore, 
the unqualified acceptance of everything just as it is. 
A theory of pure transcendence, on the other hand, tends 
to leave us with a ‘mighty darkness filling the seat of 
power,’ for only so far as God is present in our experience 
can we know anything about Him at all. It is the imma- 
nence of the transcendent, the presence of the infinite in 
our finite lives, that alone explains the essential nature 
of man—the ‘divine discontent’ which is the root of all 
progress, the strange sense of doubleness in our being, the 
incessant conflict of the lower and higher self, so graphi- 
cally described by St. Paul as a law in his members war- 
ring against the law of his mind. And the more clearly 





THE IDEA OF GOD 277 


we identify the call of the higher with our true self, the 
more unfeignedly do we recognize the illumination of 
the divine spirit. Deus wdlumimatio mea—‘In Thy light 
shall we see light.’ ” * 

This, it seems to me, is the true standpoint from which 
to estimate the significance of the Christian idea of God. 
The Christian doctrine of God essentially means that his 
innermost character, his essential nature, is revealed in 
the Christ-Life, and realized in some measure by all 
who participate in this Life. And it does shed a light 
on the tangled facts of human experience that we get 
nowhere else so fully, although there are foregleams of 
it in Plato, and Gotama Buddha and doubtless in others. 
Its most definite pre-Christian anticipation is in Isaiah 
hu. 

What the Christian doctrine does is boldly to take all 
the conflicts, and perplexities and burdens, all the hazards 
of our finite existence, and through the assertion that God 
is self-imparting, self-sacrificing Love, transform these 
puzzling facts into instruments for the realization of that 
potential divine sonship which it proclaims to be implicit 
in the nature of man. 

The crux of the problem of God is this—How can we 
reconcile the divineness of these stirrings and strivings 
in the human spirit towards a life of personal integrity, 
clean and straight in thought and action, motivated by 
love and fellowship, with the unlovely, stupid and cruel 
things in man and with the apparent indifference of the 
forces of material nature to the higher values? Yes, even 
the apparent unmorality of the impulses which are neces- 


2A. Seth Pringle Pattison in The Spirit, edited by B. H. Streeter, 
pp. 21, 22. 


278 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


sary conditions of human existence—sex, self-assertion, 
gregariousness or the herd instinct? 

The heart of the problem is the right relation between 
human personality and nature. Nature achieves her most 
worthful, most meaningful results in personality. Can 
we be certain, then, that nature is hostile or even merely 
indifferent to the true Goods of human personality? No 
doubt the supreme mystery of human life lies in the fact 
that human beings are each private centers of poignant 
feeling and yet are but dependent elements in the natural 
order. When a human individual is tortured with pain, 
goes down to mental and moral defeat, we are tempted 
to say that nature is devilish. But do we not misconceive 
the true and permanent meaning and destiny of per- 
sonality? If the world is, in the great words of Keats, 
a vale of soulmaking, have we not the right to believe 
that all the vain struggles, the anguish and despair of 
our human lives, even our most terrible losses and deepest 
griefs, are steps in the transmutation of the natural human 
animal into a spiritual personality? May not struggle 
and suffering, even utter defeat, be the means by which 
we are taught to seek first the Kingdom of the Spirit, to 
be reborn into the likeness of God, to become sons of 
God and to know and commune with our Father? If the — 
natural order be but the prelude to the spiritual order, 
then through suffering and disaster our spirits shall be 
regenerated into a communion with the transcendent spir- 
itual world. 

Then, while God is immanent in the natural cosmos 
and in increasing measure in every step upward towards 
increasing individuality, intelligence, self-initiative and 
sociability, he is most fully immanent in the lives of 


THE IDEA OF GOD 279 


those who have been purified of the sin of self-centeredness, 
who have learned selfless devotion to the things of the 
spirit, who have gained purity and integrity of heart 
of mind and will through suffering and service. 

This is the meaning of the Cross! The disciple of 
Christ has no need for the desperate resort to a finite 
God. The dilemma—either God is not good or He is a 
being limited by some brute power of evil—does not exist 
for the Christian. Dark and mysterious are the ways of 
life. “Sorrow is hard to bear and doubt is slow to clear.” 
It is hard that the innocent should suffer for the guilty, 
that by His stripes we must be healed. But if the goal 
of life, the meaning of personality, is to preserve one’s 
individuality, as a separate and private center of feeling 
and will, by having this animal center of feeling and 
impulse made over into a spiritual person who finds self- 
fulfillment by holding nothing back, by seeking not his 
own but by dedicating all his powers, in whole-mindedness 
and simplicity and purity of heart, to the service of truth, 
justice, beauty, fellowship and love, in human kind, 
Christianity offers the only solution of the riddle of the 
Sphinx. 

All the suffering, all the evil, all the apparent brutality 
and cruelty of nature, cannot hinder the achievement of 
this end. Having divested ourselves of self, having found 
self-fulfillment in selfless dedication, we become “‘as having 
nothing and yet possessing all things, as poor yet making 
many rich,” as empty and yet full. 

God is immanent in nature but He transcends nature, 
for his innermost character is revealed in the spiritual 
life of persons, who save themselves by losing themselves 
in devotion to the spiritual commonwealth of persons. 


280 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


The evils and defects inherent in the natural process are 
stepping stones on which individuals rise from their dead 
selves to spiritual personality. They put on immortal life 
when Christ dwelleth in them. 

Neither principalities nor powers nor life nor death 
are able to separate them from the love which is in Christ 
Jesus. For the deepest mystery, the mystery of evil, is 
revealed. God suffers through Christ, and all who are, 
in however humble degree, Christlike, in order that spir- 
itual personality may be fulfilled in all. There is no 
other way, no other solution. When we have learned to 
endure all things, so that our hearts are wholly cleansed 
of animal self-seeking, of duplicity and impurity, when 
we have put on the armor of single-mindedness and the 
breast plate of selfless devotion to the things of the spirit, 
we have conquered evil and death. We are become spir- 
itual persons, Sons of the Most High. 

The interrelations of action and suffering in all the 
elements of the universe, the causal interplay of all the 
factors in our world—material and vital, sentient and 
insentient—warrant the inference that there is a Uni- 
versal Ground of the orderly interdependences in the ele- 
ments of reality. As Lotze put it, using the symbol M 
for the ultimate ground of interaction, if we, for the sake 
of simplicity, take any two elements of reality A and B 
and consider the fact that the successive states or phases 
of these elements A*, A’, A® and B’, B’, B*, are inter- 
dependent there must be a Ground M for their inter- 
relations. It is impossible and out of accord with our 
ever increasing knowledge of the mutual influences exerted 
by finite beings on one another, to suppose that A, B, C, 
etc., each develop throughout its history in independence 


i 


THE IDEA OF GOD 281 


of all the others. Therefore, there must be a Ground M 
of the whole universe of interacting beings. Moreover, 
since the universe includes in its history the actions and 
passions of a graded series of sentient and conscious beings 
up and presumably beyond rational and socialized or 
moralized personality, the Ground M must be the Creative 
and Sustaining Principle of order. 

But when all this has been said, there remains the 
further question—what is the relation of this Supreme 
or Cosmical Ground to the highest qualities or values of 
personal spirit? The most powerful argument for the 
belief in a Supreme Reality which includes, conserves, 
and transcends the highest spiritual qualities of human 
personality is to be found precisely in that undying urge 
of the human spirit, that unquenchable aspiration after 
a more perfect life, which impels men notwithstanding 
their own grievous errors, lamentable failures, and sins, 
to pursue spiritual self-fulfillment. The constant struggle 
of man for a harmonious spiritual content of life, for 
the possession and enjoyment of beauty, truth, reality, 
goodness, and the transformation of their beings by these 
things, is the best witness to God. The divine in man 
implies a more divine in the universe. It is in man’s 
vocation as a being capable of a continuous quest for a 
more harmonious, deeper and more comprehensive spir- 
itual life that we find the surest evidence of the reality 
of God. For it cannot be that those qualities, without 
the partial achievement of which man is never satisfied 
and the partial achievement of which only spurs him to 
more of the same kind, are illusory by-products of a 
meaningless and worthless universe. 

It is in the very existence of the possibility of spiritual 


282 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


personality and its constant though imperfect impulse to 
further development that one finds the best key to the 
meaning of reality as a whole. 

If we take the word “moral” as equivalent to “spiritual” 
and “‘personal,’”’ then we may say that in the moral values 
lie at once the keys to the meaning of human life and of 
the universe. These include: the creation and enjoyment 
of beauty which is always conditioned by harmony of 
insight and experience; intellectual integrity and rational 
insight into the nature of things; justice, which is the 
effective recognition of the inherent value of personality 
in others; fellowship or interpersonal communion and 
love, which are various nuances of that community of 
feeling, thought and striving without which personality 
is a maimed and dwarfed life. These are the spiritual 
values. Without the growth in these qualities personality 
does not become, does not develop. They are facets or 
aspects of the life of spiritual selfhood. The Supreme 
Reality must take up and conserve and transcend these 
qualities of spiritual being. In us they are broken and 
imperfect lights, but they are our best lights on the road 
to true happiness and to God. The Supreme Spirit 
doubtless must possess these qualities (and others) in 
much higher degree than even the noblest men. But the 
qualities of His spirit must be continuous in kind with 
these qualities of the human spirit. 

Thus we can see, however dimly, that God—the Su- 
preme Source and Ground of the spiritual qualities of 
persons, of rational and moral individuals—must be the 
Eternal Perfection of that type of being which, in our 
human order, we call Spiritual Individuality or Person- 
ality. If you define a person simply as a private and 





THE IDEA OF GOD 283 


unique center of feeling, thinking, and acting, in part 
dependent upon his social relationships to others on the 
same level, and in part dependent on the physical order, 
then God is more than Person. He is superpersonal. But 
he must include in perfection all that is implied in Per- 
sonality. or the spiritual values, quest for and posses- 
sion of which are the marks of personality in the finite, 
have no being apart from selves or persons. And on the 
other hand, finite persons have no being and growth 
except as members of a community. Therefore God, the 
Source and Ground of the communion of personal spirits, 
must be a superpersonal Spiritual Life which is at once 
the fulfillment of the ideal of a spiritual community and 
of spiritual individuality. He must be the Supreme 
Instance of selfhood and community. 

At this point we reach the limits of human insight. 
It is hard for us to see how the Perfect Spirit can be 
Perfect Self and Perfect Community in one. But we can 
see that the higher and finer, the deeper and richer and 
more integrated a human self, just so much the more 
sympathetic, inclusive and universally human that self is. 
It is the fullest personality in which there is the least 
sense of apartuness, the least self-consciousness, pride and 
self-assertion. The greatest spirits are the humblest, the 
ethically greatest individuals are the most socially minded. 
Therefore, can we not say, carrying out the thought from 
which we started, that the Perfect Self is the Perfect 
Community ? 


CHAPTER XXV 
GOD, THE HOMELAND OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 


The present emphasis on the social and practical appli- 
cations of religion is very valuable. For it means the 
recognition that religion touches human lives here and 
now in every vital spot. But there is a danger to religion 
from overemphasis of the social and practical, in the 
usual sense of these terms. This danger hes in assuming 
that the entire sum and substance of religion consists 
in social ethics and its applications. From this point of 
view the sole function of religion is to render concrete 
and practical social services. The Church’s whole work 
and the minister’s sole vocation are taken to be the service 
of the community through various institutional agencies 
—to promote sociability, codperation, recreation, charit- 
able work, education, etc., through organization. 

It is a great gain to have it recognized that Jesus 
taught a social gospel. But we must not forget that He 
said, in answer to the complaint of Martha that Mary 
was sitting at His feet and listening to His words while 
she was overbusy serving: ‘‘Mary hath chosen that good 
part, which shall not be taken away from her.” We must 
not overlook the distinct, unique and private individuality 
of every soul. We must not, in effect, deny that a re 
deemed society is constituted of individual persons. The 
health of the human soul requires that it shall be able to 

284 


GOD, HOMELAND OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 285 


slake its undying thirst for communion with the Highest, 
for worship and love of those supreme Spiritual Values, 
in devotion to, and communion with which, the soul is 
lifted out of its actual weakness and poverty of inner 
life and transformed in the service of Perfection. The 
human soul can never be satisfied with itself, even with 
its fellow-souls, as they actually seem to be. The soul 
must reach out and touch a richer and more worthful 
and enduring Life, one in communion with which it finds 
both peace and inspiration to action. “Our hearts were 
made for Thee, O God, and are unquiet until they find 
Thee’ (St. Augustine); “In Thy will is our peace” 
(Dante); “Thou wouldst not search for me, unless Thou 
already possessed me” (Pascal). 

If it be said that these are words of Christian mystics 
and mysticism is outworn, I cite the case of Auguste 
Comte, who regarded himself as the founder of sociology. 
Comte proposed to substitute, for the metaphysical spir- 
itualism and mysticism of Christianity, a scientific pro- 
gram of social order and organization based on the em- 
pirical study of social facts. In this way society was to 
be made over without faith in any supernatural or mysti- 
cal background or support. But Comte found it necessary, 
in order that men might be stimulated and their affections 
moved to work for human perfection, to set up a system 
of worshtp based on the faith in the supreme reality of 
a mystically conceived Supreme Bewng, the Hternal Spirtt 
of Humamty, regarded as including in its life all the 
generations past, present and to come. What is this but 
God the Holy Spirit couched in other terms ? 

Faith in, love and worship of, an All-sustaining, All- 
embracing and Eternal Spirit, in whom all the higher 


286 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


values of life—the values which we seek and but inter- 
mittently and brokenly realize—are rooted and conserved ; 
such are the indispensable conditions for the attainment 
of a better social order, as well as for the peace and 
progress of the individual soul. Without the mystic’s 
vision and faith in God as the Homeland of all spiritual 
values there can be no health in us individually or socially. 

And, if God be the Homeland of all spiritual values, 
there is no exclusive road to communion with God which 
is the monopoly of any one institution or sect or school. 
All roads of the spirit lead to Him. 

He is known through communion with nature through 
the 

sense sublime 


Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. 


He is known in all the beauties and grandeurs of nature, 
in all the majestic forms of mountains, stars and seas, 
in all the marvelous forms, colors and activities of the 
living world, in the stately march of life through the 
ages, 

He is known in all the lineaments of law and order 
which the scientist traces out in reverent and loving study 
of nature. 

He is known through all the forms of beauty, sublimity 
and tragedy which the creative spirit of man weaves with 
materials of stone and color and sound. 

He is known, as most closely akin to the human spirit 
itself, in the march of the human spirit through history. 
He is revealed, most richly and concretely, because most 
humanly, in the deeds and teachings of all the great 
lovers of their kind who, throughout the long day of 





GOD, HOMELAND OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 287 


human history, have given to man visions of a com- 
munity of souls finding joy and peace and goodwill in 
a fellowship dedicated to the spread of justice, truth, 
beauty, friendship and love among humankind. Chief 
among these, the first-born of many brethren, is Jesus our 
Lord. His revelation does not exclude those other seers. 
It includes them. It includes that of Plato, of Gotama 
Buddha, as well as that of the great Hebrew prophets, 
his own racial forerunners. 

God is revealed and experienced in all sweet and noble 
human relationships. Rays of his light illuminate the 
life of man in every unselfish devotion, in every dedica- 
tion of the spirit of man to the well-being of his fellows, 
to the discovery and spread of truth and justice and to 
the creation and enjoyment of beauty. 

All these partial communions with God are taken up 
and included in the higher form of mysticism. There is 
a mystical element in all human experiences of value—a 
direct sense or feeling of oneness with the object which 
has value. No one can fully analyze or explain away, 
in purely theoretical terms, the beauty of a landscape, a 
seascape, a painting or a poem. No one can fully account 
for a noble friendship, a great love or even a case of 
simple comradeship. So it is with our sense of the reality 
and presence of God. All our scientific knowledge, all 
our partial visions of beauty, all our imperfect forms of 
interpersonal communion, all our contacts with the race’s 
spiritual heroes are contributory to it. But, finally, our 
sense of God as the Homeland of human values is an 
immediate and living feeling or intuition of God’s reality 
and presence in and through all forms of spiritual experi- 
ence. We know that He must ineffably transcend all we 


288 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


experience of Him. We know that the most carefully 
and comprehensively worked out theory of His Being and 
His relation to ourselves and nature is a mere skeleton 
—a, network of abstract thoughts. To admit this is not 
to undervalue speculation in theology or philosophy. 
Theory may interpret and harmonize experiences, but 
theory is no substitute for first-hand experiences. With- 
out the living sense of God’s being and presence as the 
Universal Spirit and Homeland of values, theory 1s empty 
and pallid. 

What I am saying is what Browning says in these 
words: “The rest may reason and welcome, ’tis we musi- 
cians know.” Without the mystic’s sense of the presence 
of God in his own inner experience, in nature, in the 
communal life, mere logically articulated systems of 
thought are spiritually vain. 


Our little systems have their day, 

They have their day and pass away, 
They are but broken lights of Thee, 

And Thou, O Lord, art more than they. 


Nevertheless, ‘“He is not far from any one of us. For 
in Him we live and move and have our being.” He is 
“closer to us than breathing, and nearer than hands and 
feet.” 

When some one objects that the finite cannot know the 
Infinite and, therefore, mystical knowledge is sheer illu- 
sion, the answer is that the finite and the Infinite have 
no meaning when they are sundered apart. They imply 
one another. ‘The Infinite is that in which the meaning 
and value of the finite is completely realized. We are 
finite-infinite. Although finite there is in us the idea 





GOD, HOMELAND OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 289 


and impulse towards the Infinite. This impulse is the 
potential presence of the Infinite in us. There is not one 
of our higher experiences, our aspirations or yearnings, 
not even the most severely logical thinking, which is not 
stirred by the yeast of the Infinite. Nowhere in the life 
of spirit, neither in pure logic, nor empirical science, 
nor in art or poetry, nor in personal endeavor, nor in 
social life, is there anything which moves that does not 
so move as drawn towards and by the ideal of Perfection. 
Everywhere our thoughts, our feelings, our sentiments 
and aspirations presuppose and reach out towards the 
Perfect. 

So, too, when we are told that personality is finite, 
since it is realized and enjoyed only in relation to and 
dependence on other selves, the answer is that personality, 
even in us, is not merely finite. The continual outgoing 
and upgoing of our selfhood, the continual process of 
self-transcendence, of finding our lives by losing them for 
social and impersonal ends or causes—this process is the 
very life of, the only method by which we put on or 
grow into, personality. Personality is finite-infinite and 
the most adequate, because richest and most comprehen- 
sive, revelation of the Universal Spirit. God is personal 
in the sense that personality is the fullest expression of 
His character. Since all the values and meanings of 
human life are unified and perfectly grounded in Him, 
since He is the universally immanent Spirit of the Whole, 
He is completely personal since completely social. 

We can admit that the forms and symbols, the imagi- 
native figures of speech and vision, in which the mystical 
experiences of God are clothed when one attempts to ex- 
press to his fellows the nature of the experiences, are 


290 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


inadequate; that no words can express God’s being, no 
figures give form to it. This is not a lack peculiar to 
such experiences. The richer and more comprehensive 
and meaningful any experience the more inadequate to 
its expression are all physical symbols. We may admit, 
too, that the mystic’s expressions are determined by his 
surroundings, by his social and physical environment, but 
this does not mean that he is the victim of delusions, any 
more than it means this in the case of his insights into 
natural truth or beauty or human moral and affectional 
relationships. No discoveries in historical criticism or in 
natural science can destroy the value of these mystical 
experiences of the Divine Meaning of Life. Whether one 
draw his sense of the presence of God chiefly from the 
contemplation of nature and of beauty or from the con- 
templation of human life, or from communion with Christ, 
or, what is best, from all these sources, no discoveries in 
regard to the past or the present can destroy their value. 
For this sense of the presence of God in nature, in history, 
in the human heart, is a present fact of experience. 
Man has never stood in greater need of the immediate 
sense of the Divine in experience, of the presence of God 
in his life, than he stands to-day. “The world is too 
much with us . . . getting and spending we lay waste our 
powers.” “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” 
We have invented a multitude of wondrous machines to 
give us more leisure to possess our own souls. And we 
have less leisure! We have no time to get acquainted 
with the deeps of our own nature and with God. We 
run to and fro on the earth. We are cumbered with much 
serving. ‘There is not time or quiet, amidst the ceaseless 
whir of the machinery and the relentless march of the 


GOD, HOMELAND OF SPIRITUAL VALUES 291 


hours, for thoughtfulness, for contemplation. We need 
greatly to “loaf and invite our souls’; to feed our spirits 
with the enduring values “‘in a wise passiveness.”” Western 
civilization, especially in America, is in imminent danger 
of losing its soul entirely in the clatter of the machineries 
and organizations, the busy and vociferous nothings, in 
which it is engrossed. We are offered, as explanations 
of individual and social ills, all manner of crude and 
exaggerated psychologies and sociologies. If the half of 
these were true mankind would long since have gone down 
into the pit and been forgotten as an insane aberration 
of nature. In place of thoughtfulness, meditation and 
worshipful communion with the Perfect we are offered 
for remedy all sorts of patent nostrums, from psycho- 
analysis to the latest brand of socialism. We must begin 
from within and first cleanse the inside of the cup with 
the pure and healing waters of thoughtful and reverent 
meditation. What shall an individual or a civilization 
give in exchange for its soul? The only real cure for 
the ills of our civilization is the renascence of that sense 
of communion with the Perfect by which alone the soul is 
lifted out of the whir of machinery into the presence of 
the Eternal Values. 

The central function of religion is now, as always, to 
bring man out of his weakness, his strife with himself 
and his fellows, into the strength, the peace and harmony, 
the wntegration of his life-cmpulses, which he can get only 
in communion with the Eternal Presence. This, and not 
to serve tables and run organizations, is the supreme work 
of the Church and its ministers. We need a new birth of 
meditation, of worship and contemplation, a revival of 
the spirit of the great mystics. 


CHAPTER XXVI 
MORAL EVIL AND MORAL FREEDOM 


In this chapter I shall not discuss the problem of natural 
evil—of suffering, physical catastrophes and death as inci- 
dents natural and inevitable to the life of man. The 
doctrine that man was naturally, by his creation, free from 
suffering and the fate of death and that these ills came 
into human life as a result of sin may be dismissed as 
not worthy of serious discussion. No one at all familiar 
with the facts of biology and able to think in terms of 
science will entertain such a notion. The apparently 
unjust distribution of natural evil in the human world 
is a very grave problem for a religious world-view—the 
gravest of all the speculative problems of religion. I shall 
discuss this problem separately. 

In so far as physical suffering, disease and death result 
from man’s moral delinquencies, of course these evils fall 
under our present category. 

A distinction is often made by religionists between 
moral wrong or vice and sin. It is said that sin is an 
offense against the holy personal will of God, whereas 
moral wrong is only an offense against one’s fellows. This 
distinction will not hold. If God mean the ultimate 
Ground or Principle of Spiritual Values, the Supreme or 
Cosmic Good, the good in human social order must be a 
partial expression of this Cosmic Good. Therefore, moral 

292 


i 
? 
| 





MORAL EVIL AND MORAL FREEDOM = 293 


evil and sin are only different ways of looking at the 
same fact. To say that an act or a motive is morally 
wrong is to say that it is opposed to the Good for the 
individual and for the social order. To say that the same 
act or motive is sinful is to say that it is out of harmony 
with the Cosmic Ground of the Social Order. 

Moral Evil arises from the deliberate volition and per- 
sonal choice of individuals. Harmful consequences to 
himself and others may result from acts done in involun- 
tary ignorance, but the individual so acting is not evil in 
intent or character. No one deliberately chooses evil for 
himself or for those whom he cares for. He may choose 
evil for others in the furtherance of good for himself or 
his family. He may seek revenge or will the commercial 
ruin of another to gratify his own passion. He may ruin 
a woman’s life to gratify his own lusts. But it is the 
apparent satisfaction of his own desires as good and not 
the deliberate willing of evil that leads him to these evil 
acts. He does not choose evil as evil. The evil he does 
is a consequence which comes in the train of what is to 
the agent in the moment of choice a good. 

There can be no moral evil until there is deliberate 
volition and choice. The occasion of moral evil is the 
natural man, the animal organism. As a natural or 
biological organism man is a set of impulses, cravings, 
appetites. In themselves these are neither good nor evil. 
They are neither immoral nor moral. They are simply 
the nonmoral potencies of both good and evil. The im- 
pulses of self-preservation, self-development, self-expres- 
sion, sex, love of offspring, are not evil and not good. 
They give rise to good and evil deeds; according to the 
manner, degree, and circumstances in which their gratifi- 


294 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


cations are sought consciously or deliberately. Hence the 
flesh is not inherently evil. Indeed, it is good rather 
than evil in its main tendencies; since only in this fleshly 
organism does the rational and moral spirit come to con- 
scious life and fulfillment. Of course some individuals 
are born with abnormally weak and abnormally strong 
impulses. Some seem predestined to evil from birth and 
by heredity. It is possible, nay more, it is probable that 
this predestination to moral disaster is the result of a 
bad social environment in the ancestry of the individual 
so born. For moral good and evil are social through and 
through. And, in individuals not born with abnormal 
tendencies, a bad social environment may turn the normal 
impulses in immoral directions or give to certain of them 
an exaggerated emphasis that is evil. No man sinneth 
unto himself alone and no man doeth good unto himself 
alone. A vicious social environment, the product of hu- 
man greed, callousness and stupidity, is responsible for 
much, perhaps most, of the evil twists given to normal 
and natural human impulses. 

Sin is a social fact. The forms of sin recognized in 
earlier religious thought (for instance, in the Babylonian 
Penitential Psalms) are violations either of Tabus in- 
spired by the Gods—and these Tabus have to do with 
acts whose commission or omission are harmful to the 
group over whom the God is sovereign; or sins are viola- 
tions of the social customs of those groups that are not 
matters of explicit divine ordinance (such as murder, 
cheating and adultery). The two classes of sin overlap. 
Early society is ruled by custom and tabu. Later, in the 
organization of social order, customs are codified and 





MORAL EVIL AND MORAL FREEDOM = 295 


simplified, as in the Mosaic law, the code of Hammurabi, 
the code of Manu. 

Customs or moral codes are amplified into laws having 
both divine and human sanctions in the administration 
of government. At the highest stage of social develop- 
ment the rational conscience of the morally mature indi- 
vidual is recognized to be the arbiter of good and evil 
motives and aims and the power of wise practical judg- 
ment (the Greek phronesis or prudence) to be the judge 
of the right means to achieve good ends. This does not 
mean that at the level of reflective personal morality (the 
level at which the teachings of Socrates and his succes- 
sors and of Jesus function) good and evil have passed 
beyond social reference. Moral evil or sin for which the 
individual is accountable is still social in its bearings. 

It is always as a member of a commonwealth or com- 
munity of moral persons that the individual is a respon- 
sible moral agent. Wrongdoing, wrong feeling and wrong 
thinking are sins against the spirit of the ideal com- 
munity. A man may seem to sin primarily against his 
own higher nature; as when, without having any overt 
social responsibility—not being a father, husband, a 
brother, or a son—he makes a glutton, a drug-addict or a 
drunkard of himself. But his sin is against himself as 
a member of the commonwealth of persons. It has social 
reference. The self-indulgent gifted individual who, free 
from the pressure of hunger or cold, fails to develop and 
exercise his gifts and power to the full is both sinning 
against his own higher nature and against the common 
weal. 

The fact is that, at the highest level of free personal 


296 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


and reflective moral life, the social obligations of the indi- 
vidual are more subtle, far-reaching and exigent than in 
a type of society in which the good consists simply in 
conformity to established custom and law. To say that 
there is a suprasocial spiritual or moral life which the 
individual should live in and for is only another way of 
saying that, beyond the overt demands of the obvious and 
actual social order, as expressed in custom, law and usage, 
there functions the ideal of a social community of selves 
progressing towards perfection through the free or self- 
determined perfecting of its individual members. 

It is true then that sin is antisocial, that the root of 
sin is selfishness, if we understand what we mean. Sin 
is that short-sighted and one-sided self-indulgence which 
in the same moment injures or denies the claims of the 
higher, more inclusive and more harmonious selfhood and 
thus subtracts from the increase of social good. The more 
comprehensive and harmonious and social the motives and 
aims of the self, the more selfless his volitional life, the 
more he realizes his true self as a free and responsible 
contributing member in the community of selves. 

But we have yet to face the deepest problem of the 
moral life. This life begins in the moment when the 
endwidual, having become conscious of his own impulses 
and their wdividual and social bearings, consciously 
edentifies himself with these impulses as motives. ‘There 
is no moral or immoral desire and consequently no volun- 
tary deliberation and choice until the individual becomes 
conscious of himself as one who weighs, judges, and thus 
affirms or denies his impulses and appetites. But it is 
not until he feels the urgency of impulse and appetite 
that he begins to think, It may happen that, through 


MORAL EVIL AND MORAL FREEDOM 297 


ignorance, he is led into acts which are objectively bad 
without understanding their import and consequences. 
To feel sex desire is not to sin, but one may be led to 
indulge this desire in act or even only in thought, with- 
out being aware of the harm that may accrue thereby to 
another as well as to oneself. ‘’o be angry is not neces- 
sarily to sin, but an angry impulse may have bad conse- 
quences. The beginnings of vicious courses of conduct 
are often laid in ignorance. No one willingly seeks evil 
for himself; but, in seeking what seems a natural good 
—the satisfaction of a strong impulse or urgent desire— 
he may do evil to himself as well as to others. 

Since, before we are become conscious of the natures, 
the imports and consequences of our impulses and appe- 
tites, we are not truly volitional or moral agents and 
therefore neither guilty nor praiseworthy; whereas, when 
we have entertained or indulged even in thought in the 
satisfaction of these impulses we are already embarked on 
the way to evil, it appears that we are doomed from the 
start to sin. This is the meaning of the doctrine of man’s 
natural depravity. But man is not normally a naturally 
depraved being. He is a being who grows into the stature 
of a moral personality only through struggle and choice. 
No man is sinless in the sense of being free from the 
temptation to sin. But the possibility and the incipient 
actuality of sin is the condition of growth into moral 
personality. 

In order that man may fashion himself into a moral 
personality, by the regulation and organization of his 
natural impulses and desires, he must be able to reflect, 
to judge and to choose. If there is never any real pos- 
sibility of choice by the reflective self between possible 


298 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


interests or values, morality is a delusion. Then man is 
no more guilty or responsible, no more praiseworthy or 
blameworthy, than a physical machine. To assert that 
man is but a complex machine is to sound the death knell 
of personal morality. A good man from this standpoint 
is of the same order as a good gas engine, a bad man of 
the same order as an engine in which the spark plug, the 
carburetor or some other part of the mechanism is out of 
gear. : 

The moral life, with all its implications of praise and 
blame, repentance and the satisfaction of a good con- 
science, responsibility, guilt and goodness, stands or falls 
with the truth or falsity of Kant’s famous argument “Thou 
canst, for thou oughtest.” 

Freedom of choice, then, is a postulate of the moral 
life. We may dismiss the doctrine of an arbitrary, a 
capricious free will, one that is supposed to function inde- 
pendently of concrete interests, habits, and character, as 
nonsense. Such arbitrary freedom would negative the 
possibility of the development of moral character. Free- 
dom of choice does not mean that the individual can free 
himself from either the inherited tendencies to act, which 
were the raw materials of his character, or from the habits 
of feeling, thought and action which are his present 
character. The individual is, at any stage in his career, 
a determinate and limited complex of capacities to think 
and feel and act. Whatever power of choice he has is 
determined by his original nature, as this has been organ- 
ized wnder the influence of his environment. But a normal 
moral self is a being in whom there has developed the 
paramount capacity of self-conscious reflection and choice, 
one who is able to weigh values, to balance interests and 


MORAL EVIL AND MORAL FREEDOM — 299 


to choose in the light of ends or goods which are present 
before his mind in reflection. A free individual is one 
whose motives are constituted by the conscious identifica- 
tion of interests, values and ends with the self. 

Freedom of choice, then, is limited, since the individual 
is always a limited being, limited in his capacities and 
in his opportunities. It is essential to the moral life that 
the individual self is not a fixed mechanical sum of non- 
psychical forces. If morality is to mean anything the 
self must be capable of moral change and of moral growth 
through self-determining effort. From the moral stand- 
point, there must be in the whole self a unitary capacity 
of reflection and choice. This is an ultimate datum. 
From the moral standpoint, then, the potency or capacity 
for the development of responsible self-determining choice 
is an ultimate and indefeasible reality. 

The whole crux of the problem of moral responsibility 
and of freedom, in the sense in which it is at once in 
harmony with scientific method and with the demands of 
man’s moral vocation, lies in the nature of the self. If 
personality be nothing but an exceedingly complicated 
bundle or complex of mechanically constituted contriv- 
ances—of springs, levers, cogs and combustion and trans- 
mission devices, like an automobile engine and driving 
gear, only more complex, then it is arrant nonsense to 
talk about responsibility and freedom or even educability. 
Those who make such an assumption brazenly deny 
patent facts. It is not science to ignore differences where 
differences are highly significant. All unprejudiced 
observation and all the activities of social administration 
and education, no less than the moral common sense of 
mankind, unite in supporting this thesis—The self is an 


300 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


imperfect but developing and plastic unity, capable of 
choice, able to grow into fuller harmony or integration of 
aims and activities; able, in short, to increase in rational 
and moral self-determination. The converse is true—the 
self is able to degenerate, to decline in the power of 
rational self-control. 

On the other hand the assumption that freedom of 
choice implies that the individual at the instant of choice 
could have chosen otherwise than he did appears to me 
erroneous. It zs quite true that, until the chowce is made, 
there are, for the deliberating individual in a normal 
state of mind, open alternatives. But in the actual choice, 
the opening is closed. The choice is made in the way it 
is because of the motives and considerations that then are 
uppermost or strongest for that individual. He expresses 
his individuality then and there in that particular choice. 
At that moment and in that posture of affairs he, being 
what he is, cannot choose otherwise. But he may in the 
future in a similar situation choose differently because 
of the consequences of that very choice. His nature is 
modified and other motives are reinforced by the outcome 
of his previous choice. The individual is not a mechanical 
resultant of external and internal forces. He is a living 
and plastic unity—a unity complex and self-modifiable 
—modifiable by his own power of reflection. To him 
belongs the freedom of rational deliberation. 

To say that the view that the individual could not have 
done otherwise destroys the basis of responsibility and 
praise and blame, and makes repentance and satisfaction 
and the sense of obligation meaningless, is to miss the 
important point. I may recognize that, being what I 
was, I could not then have chosen otherwise. But I can 





MORAL EVIL AND MORAL FREEDOM _ 301 


reproach myself for being what I was at that moment in 
that situation. I can repent and cultivate a stronger 
sense of responsibility. And these processes will enable 
me to choose differently now and in the future. When 
I acquit myself my satisfaction or self-respect again 
strengthens my power of choice in the right direction. 
If I reproach myself because my sense of duty was too 
weak or my moral insight defective, this reproach will 
strengthen my sense of duty and stimulate the more assidu- 
ous cultivation of moral insight. Moreover, from this 
point of view we shall be slow to judge others and shall 
keep in mind the injunction of Jesus, “judge not that 
ye be not judged.” rom this point of view vindictive 
punishment is a stupid cruelty. MRetributive justice is 
justified only as a corroborative measurement. 

On the other hand, social freedom and responsibility 
are correlative, since it 1s just in a free society that men 
develop their full moral statures by being held responsible 
for their own acts. Only thus can they develop respon- 
sible moral freedom. In any society where human beings 
are not treated as machines they must be held responsible, 
praised and blamed, corrected and encouraged in order 
that they may develop that rational self-determination 
which is identical with genuine moral freedom. 

Freedom means that power of self-determining choice 
by which the individual is able to weigh and value, to 
judge and choose between alternative motives and ends. 
A free, moral act is one which is not determined until 
the whole self consciously chooses the first step. Having 
committed himself thus far the agent is not free. He 
who wills an end wills all that end entails. 

Might then the individual have chosen otherwise? Be- 


802 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


fore the moment of choice, Yes! At the moment of 
choice, No! Up to the instant of actual decision, if the 
act was a voluntary one, he must have been free to choose 
the other alternative. What he was in part was decided 
by the very act. He was different before and after the 
choice. It may have been a choice in which he affirmed 
further his moral freedom or one in which he forged a 
fresh link in the fetters of a vicious habit. 

The real possibility of moral evil and moral good, the 
development of the individual into a moral personality, 
are meaningless delusions unless there is in the individual, 
over and above his natural impulses in their original form 
and over and above even the character already in part 
formed by indulgence of these impulses, a rational prin- 
ciple in the self which can set up and follow the good. 
The only freedom possible and needful is the freedom of 
rational reflection and choice. 

So long as the power to choose remains, the spiritual 
self is alive. When, as is possible by a continued evil 
career, this power is lost, the wages of sin have been 
reaped fully. The wages of continued sin are death. 
This is the sin against the Holy Spirit in the human self. 
Whether man can thus fully murder his own spirit I do 
not know. 

In the opposite direction, continued choice of the good 
must result in such a harmony between the spiritual prin- 
ciple and the natural impulses that it is no longer prac- 
tically possible for the person to choose an evil course. 
Freedom of choice issues in that complete moral self- 
determination which is perfect freedom; but no freedom 
to choose the evil way. 

The darkest mystery of all in this connection is the 





MORAL EVIL AND MORAL FREEDOM — 303 


fact that so many human beings seem born without the 
power ever to become actually free—moral imbeciles or 
moral monsters. Why should some be born to be vessels 
of dishonor? Why the defects of mature and taints of 
blood which make the natural criminal or moral imbecile ? 
In part, no doubt, perhaps entirely, these tragic deformi- 
ties of the human spirit are the effects of the sins of 
ancestors and of the evil nature of society. 

Many wrecked lives are due to the evil character of 
society. Untoward social environments are responsible 
for many of the mental disorders that are the causes of 
the sins and crimes of individuals. We are only just 
beginning to get a glimpse of the truth that most criminals 
and defectives are mentally disordered, and that, in the 
last analysis, these disorders spring from the hardness, 
the selfishness, the stupid cruelty and the greed of those 
who should be the responsible leaders in the conduct of 
a better social order. Jesus said, “‘Whoso shall cause one 
of these little ones which believe on me, to stumble, it 
were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his 
neck and that he were plunged in the depth of the sea.” 

We must take this saying in all its length and breadth 
and depth of meaning. Jesus knew the extraordinary 
delicacy and plasticity of the human soul in its budding 
years. He saw that dwarfed and maimed and twisted 
spirits—sick souls—were due to the cruelties, the hard- 
nesses, the stupidities and greed of those who, having 
power of leadership and rule and wealth, betrayed their 
trust and offended those who were by nature destined for 
the Kingdom of Heaven. 

The prime source of the most widespread and appar- 
ently immitigable moral evils are human greed, human 


304 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


selfishness, stupidity and lack of imaginative sympathy. 
The greatest evils spring from the crimes against child- 
hood and youth—the lack of healthy physical and social 
environment, the lack of opportunity for full physical, 
mental and moral education; the lack of opportunity to 
earn a livelihood under moral and humane conditions. 

The prime sources of moral evils are selfish greed, and 
stupidity which lead to cruelty. These, together with 
self-righteousness are the major sins—greater sins than 
the sins of the flesh, though the latter are subtle and soul 
destroying when they are the results of the deliberate 
pursuit of self-gratification. 

Religion, with its vision of a perfected social order, the 
ideal commonwealth of moral personalities, must forever 
wage unceasing warfare on behalf of every movement to 
give light and air and intellectual and moral nurture to 
the spirits of the young. Those who have the power of 
leadership, of rule, of wealth, of influence, of teaching 
and writing and use these powers to injure or corrupt 


the spirits of the little ones and of youth are the greatest 


sinners, the chief devils, in our complex society. 

Why should the spirit that breeds moral evil in society 
in the manifold ways of supporting and pandering to 
vice, of hindering and hampering economic and educa- 
tional and moral opportunity for moral personality to 
develop, be allowed to run rampant? Why should so 


much evil be permitted to flourish in our social order? 


We do not know fully. We can only partially answer 
such questions. The only way in which finite natural 
individuals can grow into the stature of full moral per- 
sonalities is in this mixed world, full of dangers and 
beset with temptations. Through toil and _ struggle, 








MORAL EVIL AND MORAL FREEDOM — 305 


through error and failure, through stupid selfishness and 
wanton cruelty, the soul of man wins its way, groping 
ofttimes blindly, stumbling in the mire to rise again. It 
seems as if some diabolical power contrives again and 
again to turn or lure man’s soul aside from the paths of 
reason, justice, love and happiness. And we cry, ‘‘Lead 
kindly light amid the encircling gloom, lead thou me on. 
The way is dark and I am far from home.” 

We should have to give up in despair if we might not 
hope and believe that somehow there is a Cosmic Soul of 
Goodness that is and will ever be triumphant; and those 
who here have had no fair chance to achieve the eternal 
life which is the more abundant life of harmony, com- 
prehensiveness and joy may yet enter into it. 


CHAPTER XXVIII 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 


It often seems as if the Inscrutable Power which mani- 
fests its boundless wealth of creative energy in the lavish 
production of a vast variety of living forms and which 
has brought forth in man the most highly individual and 
richly endowed living being, either has done so only to 
make mock of its finest handiwork, or else is hindered and 
thwarted by some brute fate or malevolent destructive 
power; so that the fairest and richest form of finite indi- 
viduality must, in proportion to its keenness, depth and 
range of feeling, thought and striving, suffer and be made 
the sport of either actively malign or brutally indifferent 
forces. Else why do lives fair in promise, goodly in body 
and mind, go to seeming wrack and ruin? Why all the 
physical suffering, mental anguish and disorder which 
human beings bear for no deliberate sin of their own or 
their immediate ancestors? Or, if all these defects, sor- 
rows and defeats are traceable to the original sin of man- 
kind’s first progenitors, why then, among the host of 
Adam’s descendants, should the selfish, the hard and cal- 
lous, the low-browed, the servants of Mammon, so often 
go scot-free and prosper, while the loveliest and most 
finely organized natures suffer and even disintegrate in 
mind without obvious cause or justifiable result ? 

The problem of evil is the greatest stumbling block in 

306 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 307 


the way of faith in a single and absolutely perfect Spir- 
itual Power conceived as the common ground of nature 
and human life. Nature seems wholly “careless of the 
single life,” and even of the type, as Tennyson put it; 
utterly unregardful of the fate of the richest individuali- 
ties which she brings into existence and nurtures for a 
moment and then wantonly casts aside on her rubbish 
heap. No solution of the problem of evil that has ever 
been offered is satisfactory. Are we told that “evil is 
naught, ’tis silence implying sound,” as writers from 
Plotinus and Augustine to Browning have said? We 
reply that evil for which we can see no justificatory or 
remedial value, evil to which no one can point as specifi- 
cally contributing to the good of any one as much as it 
subtracts from the good of those who suffer from it, is a 
positive and heart-rending fact. It is no illusion, unless 
everything in human life be illusion and then all basis 
for thought and action is dissolved. 

To say that evil is a necessary element in the make-up 
of a world which on the whole is good is one way of mak- 
ing the best of the stern facts. Evil is evidently inevi- 
table, in the sense that it is an inescapable factor in our 
human world. To say that the world is, on the whole, 
good is to say what we do not certainly know. It is to 
make a venture of redoubtable faith in the face of an 
equivocal situation. There are but three ways of dealing 
with the problem of evil. The two first are forms of 
cosmical dualism, personalistic and wmpersonalistic re- 
spectively; the third is a monistic theory of the world. 

1. Evil is due to the free will of personal beings, 
angelic and human. God permits it, but he is not its 
cause, nor is he to be held responsible for it. He created 


308 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


angels and human beings with the power of free and 
arbitrary choice and some of them chose evil. The uni- 
verse was originally good through and through; it con- 
tained neither disease, suffering nor death. One of the 
angelic beings, the proud Lucifer or Satan, in his insati- 
able thirst for power led a host of his fellow-angels in 
rebellion against God. They cannot prevail against the 
Almighty, but they must work out and suffer the conse- 
quences of their contumacy. Satan is permitted to tempt 
man. Man, being free, is tempted and falls. Thus sin, 
the result of the exercise of an inscrutable freedom, enters 
into the human world. It brings in its train, disease, 
suffering and death. Thus God is absolved from respon- 
sibility for evil, which is the result of the misuse of the 
high prerogative of free will, first by superhuman agents 
and next by human agents. 

The Kingdom of Evil, once established, can only be 
undermined and destroyed by atonement for sin through 
suffering. Man, being finite, is unable to atone for his 
infinite sin against the Perfect Holiness of God. God 
sends his only Son to suffer and thus to make atonement 
and to redeem men from sin, suffering and death. 

This is a touching doctrine, but it is no solution of the 
problem of evil. 

In the first place, it takes no account of the part borne 
by suffering, disease and death in the whole economy of 
animate nature. Biologically, suffering, disease and 
death are incidents in the evolution of animal life, as 
well as in the development of the individual. Beings de- 
void of sensation would not suffer. Beings devoid of 
sensation would not develop far in power of adaptation 
to, and control of, their environments. Without nervous 





THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 309 


systems living individuals would be plantlike. The higher 
and more individualized and efficient the organism, the 
more finely organized the nervous system and the greater 
the capacity for suffering. Disease is a state attendant 
upon the unstable equilibrium of the organism, which in 
turn is the condition of its power of adaptation to the en- 
vironment. Death is a necessary incident in the on-going 
of life. A deathless organism is an unconceivability. 
The individuated life foree may pass from one organic 
habitation to another and so develop into greater perfec- 
tion, but one cannot understand a living body that does 
not die. All finite lives must pass through the gate of 
death, perhaps into higher forms of individuality. 

The doctrine does not free the Creator from ultimate 
responsibility for evil. For He created beings endowed 
with freedom and the impulse to rebel against Him, know- 
ing that they would do so. He was responsible for their 
existence with the natures they have. ‘Therefore, ulti- 
mately He is responsible for their free acts and the con- 
sequences thereof. Moreover, he permits them to con- 
tinue in their courses. Either then God could not do 
otherwise; He is a finite being and not the Creator of 
the evil tendencies in angels and men. Or He is respon- 
sible for the possibility of evil and the world in which 
evil is possible is a better and richer world, one with more 
movement and individuality, than a mechanically perfect 
Paradise. 

For it is not apparent on this theory, why those who 
have not willed evil, who have not sinned, should suffer 
from it. The doctrine that an all-powerful, all-wise God 
permits the infliction of grievous evils on innocent per- 
sons, in order to vindicate his holiness, which was offended 


310 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


by the free act of sin of some remote ancestor, seems to 
me to imply the worship of a Moloch, not a just God, 
much less a loving one. This doctrine is an offense to 
humane reason. It supposes God to be either a vindictive 
tyrant and man since Adam a mere puppet, or God to be 
helpless in the face of the facts. 

The doctrine of the innate depravity of the human 
race does not lighten the problem in any way. For the 
Cosmic Order must be responsible for man’s state of 
innate depravity. Moreover, the impulses that make for 
goodness, for balanced intelligence, for harmony and hap- 
piness in human life are just as innate as the impulses 
that make for evil. 

If God be not responsible for Satan and his works, 
then there is an eternal conflict between two Cosmic 
Powers or hosts. Why then stop at two? Why not go 
back to polytheism and polydemonism? Why not admit 
that there are many beings superior to man and that these 
beings are not in harmony with one another, do not con- 
stitute an economy or cosmic order ¢ 

2. The second type of cosmic dualism makes evil result 
from the conflict between spirit and brute matter. There 
is a power or stream of tendency in the universe making 
for goodness, for justice, for integrity, for friendship, 
for love, for happiness—in a word, for the ethical and 
other values of the human spirit. But this power is hin- 
dered in running the race that is set before it, by obstacles 
resident in the nature of matter as blind, inert and form- 
less. 

The physicochemical conditions of human existence, in 
nervous organization and the other living tissues, are 1m- 
perfect instruments for the realization of the life of soul 





: 
} 
‘ 
‘ 
. 
q 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 311 


or spirit. It is possible that matter will become more 
subservient to the development and fruition of spiritual 
life. It is possible that matter will continue to be a 
hindrance of equal magnitude. At any rate, the spiritual 
forces are limited or finite. Matter is not omnipotent, 
but it is not the ready and subservient tool of spirit. The 
imperfections and sufferings in the living world are due 
to this obstructive character of brute and insensate matter. 

The attempt to escape the problem of evil by cutting 
the universe in two with a hatchet and supposing that 
a second cosmic power, impersonal brute matter, wars 
against a finite cosmic power of Good (the limited God 
of dualists) will not do. The cure is worse than the 
disease. 

There is no scientific ground for supposing matter to 
be evil or to be obstructive to the operation of intelligence. 
Intelligence and will are called into play in the effort 
to understand and control the material universe for hu- 
man and spiritual ends. The steady progress of modern 
science makes this sort of dualism obsolescent. One can 
understand why ancient thinkers, pondering over this 
perplexing mystery, should suppose, as do Plato, Aristotle 
and Plotinus, that formless or unorganized matter is the 
polar opposite of mind—of the forms of the True, the 
Good and the Beautiful. They lived when the work of 
science had hardly begun. But no one in touch with 
modern science and its achievements and promises can 
entertain such a notion. So far is matter from being 
an unintelligible formless brute obstruction to spirit, that 
it is just in discovering the forms and relationships of 
material energies that spirit achieves some of its greatest 
triumphs. Matter is not formless and disordered. It 


312 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


is the underpinning of mind. It is the substructure of 
human life. Through our sciences, our arts and crafts, 
we live better the more we understand nature. ‘The dis- 
eases of human beings are not due to lifeless matter. 
They are caused by the struggle of microscopic and ultra- 
microscopic organisms. The physical obstacles to human 
life, even the great natural catastrophes, are surmountable 
and avoidable in great part. 

In our esthetic relation to physical nature there is a 
spiritual, a truly religious quality. We cannot say that 
nature apart from man gives evidence of being haunted 
by our “struggling tasked morality,” that she feels qualms 
of conscience or strives for an ideal or either loves or 
pities human beings. Nevertheless, in contemplating her 
majesty, sublimity or homely picturesqueness, our spirits 
are calmed and elevated. ‘The material universe is not 
evil. It is grand, terrible, sublime, beautiful, friendly 
by turns. 

Nature does make jettison of our egoistic aims and oft 
turns a stony face to our puny wailings. But nature is 
our home; the framework, substructure and support of 
our lives. I question whether the attitude of faultfinding 
towards nature is ever justifiable; certainly it is worse 
than profitless. If she is not always as kind as we would 
have her, she is not cruel to us as other persons are. In 
her majesty she shows neither envy, nor malice. Com- 
munion with her is a calming, healing and uplifting ex- 
perience. By it man is raised out of sordidness, pettiness 
and egoistic whining. Jesus was right in his attitude 
towards nature. 

Cosmical dualism is without adequate scientific sup- 
port. Kthically and religiously it is wanting, too. For, 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 318 


if there be a Cosmic Power of Evil over against the 
Cosmic Good, we lose the sense of the unity and harmony 
of the universe which is a calming, uplifting and heart- 
ening experience. On the other hand, if there be no cos- 
mos or universe but a duoverse of either God and the 
Devil or Spirit and Matter, we are helpless. We have 
then no right to the faith that the Good is triumphant 
or will ever be triumphant. Moreover, if we admit a 
duoverse, why should we not go on back to a multiverse— 
to cosmic pluralism; in short, to polytheism ? 

The only faith that will really nerve and comfort a 
thoughtful human being is not that the Good may possibly 
triumph somewhere and some day, but that it is even 
now supreme. | 

3. The least unsatisfactory attitude towards this ulti- 
mate riddle of the sphinx is to admit the reality of evil 
and its inevitableness as a factor contributary, on the 
whole, to the beauty, the grandeur, the meaning and good- 
ness of the universe. 

Evil, then, is a necessary and contributing factor in the 
goodness of the whole. We may not be able to under- 
stand the incidence of the particular distribution of evils. 
But we can see that, if spiritual selfhood develops only 
through the effort which begins in the lower organisms 
in the growth of individuality, and which flowers in man 
in consciousness, in rational volition and creative think- 
ing, then the “hazards and hardships” * of finite selfhood 
are the inevitable conditions for the development of the 
soul, for the appearance of spiritual individuality. This 
world then is, as Keats puts it, the “vale of soul making.” 





1 This phrase I take from Bernard Bosanquet, 


314 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


And the finest, richest, deepest, most harmonious self- 
hood is developed just by those who face and bear with 
courage and self-abnegation the burden of evil for their 
fellows. 

The entire evolutionary process seems, in so far as we 
can read its meaning from the data at our disposal, to 
have labored to bring forth rational and moral individu- 
alities or personalities. The tendency of the cosmic proc- 
ess is to personify itself, as W. K. Clifford observed. On 
the other hand, the Cosmic Order sometimes seems to 
have no concern for the fate of persons. If we define the 
good as the full and harmonious functioning of personal 
life, then we must admit that this good is very imper- 
fectly realized on earth. Many selves seem to be “cast 
as rubbish to the void.” Many lives are wrecked. Many 
selves, that set out with fair promise of realizing har- 
monious and happy lives, are ruined through no obvious 
faults of their own or their parents. Nature or the Cos- 
mic Order does not seem to care for the individual as we 
human beings do. 

Jesus and other teachers of religion have employed the 
homely and beautiful symbol of Fatherhood, to express 
the attitude of the cosmic order towards persons. But 
when one looks the facts squarely in the face the symbol 
seems to lose its meaning. A human father who, if he 
could prevent it, would yet permit his children to suffer 
such dire fates, ignorantly to endure such thwarted, 
maimed and twisted lives, as fall to the lot of many 
human beings, would be adjudged an inhumane and wan- 
tonly cruel parent. In view of the vast amount of physi- 
eal suffering and mental anguish and disorder in the 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 315 


human world, by what right does one affirm that the 
Supreme Ordering Power of the universe is in any re- 
spects like a loving Father ? 

Herein lies the supreme paradox of human existence— 
individual persons are the bearers of all values; persons 
alone love and are loved, seek and enjoy truth, beauty 
and all other forms of spiritual value; but persons, al- 
though the richest offspring of the cosmic order, in that 
order seem cruelly treated and wantonly destroyed. 

In short, we face a trilemma—either (1) Evil origi- 
nates in a source independent of the Good, and then it 
may never be overcome, may indeed triumph; or (2) the 
good of the universe is something more than the fruition 
of personality, our human values have not the place in 
the universe that we are fain to believe they should have, 
_and we do not know what place these values have in the 
ultimate scheme of things; or (3), notwithstanding all 
appearances to the contrary, selves will endure and pro- 
gress and all the failures here will be made good, some 
where and some time. 

The first alternative is not in harmony with a scientific 
conception of the unity of the universe and leaves in 
everlasting doubt the issue of the struggle between Good 
and evil. The second alternative leaves us much in the 
dark as to the positive place of human goodness in the 
nature of things, but it affirms the faith that there is 
a supreme Good, though we do not know what it is like, 
and that the values of our lives are merged in the supreme 
value. ‘The third alternative is the hardest to take, in 
the fact of the ubiquity of evil and death, but it holds 
out the fairest promise for the fruition and permanence 


316 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


of human values. It is a hope which can, through faith, 
be transmuted into a source of strength and comfort for 
the buffeted spirit. 

Faith in personal immortality is not so much a solution 
of the terrible problem of evil, as it is the courageous 
venture of an escape through the recognition that man is 
a pilgrim of eternity whose life here on earth is but a 
moment in the march of his spirit. 

To take this standpoint is to make a virtue of necessity. 
It does not solve the problem of the apparently unjust 
distribution of evil. It does not make clear to us why 
promising lives should be blasted in the bud and why 
useless and even wicked men should encumber this earth 
to a hale old age, why the wicked should flourish like 
a green bay tree, while the seed of the righteous should beg 
their bread, why catastrophe and pestilence, war and 
famine should strike down the best and let the worst 
escape unscathed—all this remains a “burthen and a 
mystery.” We can take refuge only in faith—faith that 
there is a redemptive power in the sufferings of the right- 
eous, faith that evil is overcome by the atonement made 
by the sorrows borne and the evils undergone by the wisest 
and most loving for the evil deeds and evil motives of 
their fellows. 

The Christian religion strikes at the heart of this prob- 
lem just in this way. If the attitude of Jesus be indeed 
the best key to the spiritual meaning of existence, if he 
be Divine in the spiritual quality of his character and 
deeds, this means that the supreme secret of the universe 
is revealed as the self-imparting, self-sacrificing love that 
fears not any evil or sorrow; but, meeting and bearing 
all that man can bear, triumphs over evil. “The Son 





THE PROBLEM OF EVIL o17 


of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister,” 
“He gave his life a ransom for many,” “For I am per- 
suaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor prin- 
cipalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor 
powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, 
shall be able to separate us from the love of God which 
is in Christ Jesus.” Romans viii: 38, 39. 

The way of escape from suffering and natural evil for 
Gotama Buddha is by the uprooting of all desire and the 
utter extinction of will by that state of desiring nothing 
and willing nothing which means the cessation of per- 
sonality. The way of escape from the power of evil for 
a disciple of Jesus is the dedication of one’s personality to 
the struggle against evil, the positive devotion of the self 
in service of love; which means indeed selflessness, but 
not the cessation of personality. It means rather the de- 
velopment of spiritual selfhood through dedication and 
service to ever widening and deepening aims. 


CHAPTER XXVIII 


PRAYER 

Prayer and Faith are interdependent. One absolutely 
devoid of faith could not pray. If life were so complete 
and self-sufficient that faith were superfluous, prayer 
would be superfluous. Prayer springs out of the same 
feeling of need and dependence that gives rise to faith. 
One may pray for greater faith. When in distress and 
perplexity of mind one may call desperately “Lord, I be- 
lieve, help thou mine unbelief!’ Hence there may be 
earnest prayer but weak faith. But not the converse. A 
strong faith does not mean a lack of prayerfulness. For 
prayer, at its highest level is the attitude in which the 
soul seeks communion with the Perfect and Eternal. 

Prayer at its best is not petition for temporal blessings, 
but aspiration after the peace which passeth all under- 
standing. To pray spiritually is to repose one’s spirit 
on God; to commit one’s present and future interests into 
the care of the Universal Spirit; to say, even while long- 
ing and hoping that one’s distresses may be relieved, one’s 
sorrows healed, “Nevertheless, not my will but thine be 
done.” At a lower stage of spiritual life men pray when 
they urgently long for temporal goods or for the removal 
of temporal ills. At a higher stage they pray for their 
loved ones. Prayer for the health or well-being of one’s 
loved ones is a higher prayer than prayer for temporal 

318 





PRAYER 319 


goods, since in it self is almost forgotten. Self is merged 
in other selves. So, too, is prayer for the well-being of 
those who are strangers to us. But prayer is not truly 
spiritual until one is willing to put all one’s own private 
desires and interests entirely behind one’s self, and trust 
all in submission to the order of things. 

It is not unspiritual to pray for temporal sustenance, 
“Give us this day our daily bread” and ‘‘deliver us from 
evil,” provided that in our attitude we first say, “Hallowed 
be thy name, Thy kingdom come.” 

It is argued that prayer is purely subjective, that it 
is absurd to suppose that any petition of a being so insig- 
nificant as man can affect the course of events. Prayer 
7s subjective. It’ is the worshipful and trustful com- 
munion of the human person with the Universal Spirit. 
But it is not “purely” or “merely” subjective, if human 
persons are real and worthful members of the Unwwerse. 
Only if personality were an utter illusion would prayer 
be objectively meaningless. Since persons are real mem- 
bers of the universe, the attitude of a person toward the 
whole in which he is a member must make some differ- 
ence to the spirit of the whole. It is no disturbance of 
the universal order, nay rather it is a fulfillment of that 
order, that man’s spiritual communion with the Perma- 
nent and Perfect in prayer should affect the Permanent 
Being. It would indeed be senseless to suppose that, while 
human persons are truly members of the Universal Spir- 
itual Order, their personal attitudes can make no real 
difference in that order. 

The answer to prayer may be very different from what 
the petitioner looks for and desires, but to say that there 
is never any response to prayer is to close the whole prob- 


320 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


lem at the start, by assuming the materialistic position 
that the universe is a blind machine and man but a minute 
part of the cosmical mechanism. Whether one take the 
position of personalistic theism that the universe of selves 
consists of many finite selves and God in mutual rela- 
tions, or the position of idealistic pantheism that human 
selves are elements in the Universal Spirit, literally parts 
of God’s being; in either case prayer, whether as com- 
munion with the Great Other Being or, as communion 
with the whole of which the individual is a true part, is 
fully justified. Indeed, in the higher communion with 
God in prayer the line which separates the personalistic 
theist from the idealist pantheist seems to become thin 
and wavering. In communion with the Enduring Spirit 
how can one say, “here I end and God begins to be?” 
Whether one in his individual interpretation affirms the 
reality of a community of spirits not elements in one all- 
embracing spirit (personalistic theism) or affirms that all 
finite spirits are included in the Universal Spirit, and 
that, quite literally, ‘in Him we live and move and have 
our being’; in either case the prayerful attitude of sub- 
mission, trust, and communion, the attitude in which one 
takes all one’s burdens and perplexities, one’s doubts and 
heartaches and lays them down before the Heart of the 
Universe is the same, 

The spiritually minded devotee may even pray for 
temporal goods if he does so in the spirit of submission 
and reverent communion; that is, if he thereby confesses 
his weakness, need, and dependence on God. For the 
essence of irreligion, of unfaith, is simply that proud self- 
satisfaction with one’s actual being and condition that 
igsues in a complete independence and self-reliance. When 





PRAYER 321 


we have this spirit we are headed for trouble. Our spirits 
will be broken on the wheel of the universe. 

Prayer, for one who rejects a dualistic conception 
which separates the Supreme Reality from Nature, and 
who thereby recognizes that the universe is an orderly 
whole, is the act of placing one’s whole self in reverent 
communion with the Universal Order. ‘To pray is to 
bring one’s spirit into harmony with the Universal Spirit. 
It is willing submission and acceptance of the course of 
Reality. The first petition should be that one’s own will 
shall be in union with the Universal will. But it is nat- 
ural and inevitable at critical times that one should send 
up specific petitions, that one should beseech the safety, 
the recovery from illness or from moral weakness of one’s 
loved ones or one’s friends. Intercessory prayer is an 
expression of one’s concern for one’s fellows. Is such 
prayer futile and without meaning? Not if it be made 
with an express recognition of the dependence of all con- 
cerned on the order of the whole. It is even possible 
that prayer of this sort is a factor in bringing to pass 
what is sought for. For if reality is a living whole, the 
expression of a Universal Life or Spirit, there is no rea- 
son why the acts of finite selves should not be factors that 
evoke some response within the whole. 

Since man is essentially a being who develops his high- 
est capacities in the community of acting, thinking, feel- 
ing with other persons, common prayer is an expression 
of the deepest humanity, an utterance of the common 
spirit of dependence, devotion, and obedience which 
brings men into better communion with the whole of 
Reality. 

Can prayer for specific material changes be regarded 


322 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


as a factor in such changes—prayer for rain, for fair 
weather, for good crops? Such prayers are expressions 
of human need and dependence. As explicit recognitions 
of our dependence they are naturally human. But the 
belief that the weather will be changed in any particular 
* locality in response to the petitions of some group suffer- 
ing from drought is surely illusory. The course of ma- 
terial events is the expression of the universal order. It 
is true, as some defénders of the efficacy of prayer for 
physical changes argue, that we are not to suppose that 
the material order goes on independent of or apart from 
the vital and spiritual orders. These orders are inter- 
woven. But it is going farther than a sound science and 
philosophy can take one to suppose that, for example, 
since we do not know all the causal conditions of climatic 
changes, therefore human prayers can produce climatic 
changes. Of course if human prayers stir men to act 
on the forces of nature, by draining or clearing land, cli- 
matic changes may follow. But such prayers are not 
direct causes of the changes. The laws of nature are 
only statements of the actual causal sequences in nature. 
We know these only in small part. But we know enough 
to know that the procession of nature, while on the whole 
it makes human life and spirit possible, goes on regardless 
of the particular physical vicissitudes of individuals and 
groups. Any doctrine of the efficacy of prayer which 
implies that prayer is a direct causative agency in alter- 
ing the infinite unhasting and unresting course of natural 
events is based on the denial that the whole order of nature 
is the expression of the activity of the Supreme Reality, 
the Universal Ground of the life of man and nature. To 
argue that because our human knowledge of the causal 





PRAYER 823 


sequences of the natural order is very insufficient, there- 
fore prayer may be a natural cause of the same order as 
electricity, the expansion of gases or the solidification of 
liquids, is to make an appeal to ignorance, and to crown 
ignorance with confusion. We must make our choice 
between explicit admission that the whole endless and 
boundless order of nature is the expression of the ever- 
energizing and supreme Creative and Rational will and 
the view that there is no universal order, but only little 
stretches of orderly behavior, here and there, intermitted 
by unaccountable spasms and jumps. We cannot have it 
both hot and cold. We cannot admit that nature is the 
living garment of Deity and then turn around and say 
that, since we do not know the whole design and pat- 
tern, nature is but a thing of shreds and patches that 
may be sewn together hither and yon in response to prayer. 

In short, while men in dire need will continue to pray 
for changes to be made by superhuman agency in the 
actual causal procession of material events, it 1s unrea- 
sonable to ask and expect such changes. The forces which 
operate in nature (the system of the living and nonliving, 
if there be nonliving material things) are many, complex, 
and still but ill-understood. But the progress of knowl- 
edge, and the basic principles of science counsel us to 
pray to get understanding, patience and humility; so 
that we may learn to control where possible, and, where 
impossible, to submit to the operation of natural causes. 
The argument that if God is the Infinite, then he may 
interrupt the course of nature and interject nonnatural 
forces into the causal procession, since human persons do 
interrupt or direct natural forces, begs the whole question 
by covertly making the following fallacious assumptions: 


324 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


1. That man controls or directs natural forces in any 
other way than by understanding their behaviors and in- 
terpretations and thus controlling or modifying their 
operations by releasing other forces. Man’s control over 
nature is the result of intelligent apprehension of, and 
submission to, its order. The first premise in this con- 
trol is that there is an order that can be understood and 
followed, but not contravened. 

2. The second fallacy lies in supposing that God stands 
in the same relation to nature that a human person does, 
only in a more eminent degree. The forces of nature are 
not the expression of human will. They are gwen hard 
data which human intelligence can understand in part and 
by understanding adapt itself to. On any other philos- 
ophy than a complete metaphysical dualism the forces 
of nature are not data external to the Divine Creative 
and Sustaining Will. They are the continuous expres- 
sion of that will. 

3. Let us not assume that God is a person just like 
a human person subject to change in his purposes and 
feelings and thus likely to suspend or alter the course of 
that material order, which is the utterance of his creative 
will, in answer to our petitions. 

Prayer, then, for a reasonable person, is the act of 
communion with, of submission and obedience to, the 
Universal Spirit. Petitions made should be made in the 
spirit of Jesus. ‘Father, if it be possible let this cup pass 
from me! Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.” 





CHAPTER XXIX 
IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 


The belief in the immortality of the soul is very old. 
In its earliest form it was a corollary of Animism and 
Dualism—the belief that the soul of man is a finer, more 
elusive and tenuous double or replica of the bodily self. 
Primitive people seem quite generally to have held the 
view that, in this present life, the soul is separable from 
the body, that it can and does leave the body, especially 
_ during sleep, and reénter the body. From this point of 
view there was no difficulty in the assumption that a soul 
might pass from one body into another; hence the belief 
in demoniacal possession. If such things were of daily 
occurrence in the present life, it was most natural to 
believe that the souls of the dead returned to their former 
habitats and appeared to both friends and enemies. It 
is to be noted further that the soul, in primitive thinking, 
is not really an immaterial entity. It is a more subtle 
and elastic material substance than the ordinary body. 

Our present scientific knowledge of the relations of 
body and mind are, on the whole, hostile to the assumption 
that these are absolutely separable entities. Neurology, 
psychology and comparative anatomy unite in pointing 
to the close interdependence of the mind and the brain. 
Therefore, it is much more difficult for one in touch with 
scientific thought to believe that the soul or mental self 

325 


326 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


survives the disintegration of the brain than it was even 
a hundred years ago. And yet the hunger for assurance 
of immortality has not ceased in the face of this apparent 
negative finding of science. Indeed, the tremendous psy- 
chical strain of the World War, with the loss of millions 
of loved ones, and with “all the burthen of the mystery,” 
“the heavy and the weary weight of this unintelligible 
world,” has sharpened this hunger. The old question, “If 
a man die shall he live again?” comes up with heightened 
poignancy to-day. 

No wonder that many are turning to Spiritism for 
assurance of the immortality of their loved ones and for 
the comforting promise that they shall again see them 
face to face. 

I shall state briefly why I regard Spiritism as a broken 
reed on which to lean for support of faith in immortality 
before advancing other considerations. 

1. Spiritism is really based on animistic Dualism and 
a quasi-material conception of the soul or spirit. Its meta- 
physics is a survival of primitive thought. Myers ad- 
mitted as much, but very few of his followers do. For 
the spirits who communicate to the living through medi- 
ums do so through matertalizations. It may be admitted 
that all communications to us must employ physical 
symbols of sound and writing, though if telepathy be true 
(which I do not admit) it is difficult to understand why 
even the ordinary symbols of speech should be necessary. 
But breezes, ectoplasms and cantilever rods are certainly 
materialistic enough manifestations of soul to satisfy a 
Hottentot. 

2. If Spiritism be, as its adherents claim, empirically 
verifiable, why are its phenomena so sporadic, so com- 





IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 327 


monly confined to suspiciously queer conditions and ab- 
normal or illiterate persons? The test of fact in science 
is that, under conditions that are constant and perfectly 
definable, any one of normal intelligence who will take the 
trouble to verify the alleged facts can do so without re- 
course to half-lights, darkness or cataleptic trances. 

3. Why should communications be vouchsafed to so 
few people? There are millions of us who would like 
some message that is significant or valuable from beyond 
the grave and cannot get anything worth while. 

4, Why should the communications be concerned with 
such trivial, crude and silly matters as they are? Why 
should they be so suspiciously reminiscent of the material 
concerns of our present existence? Why should the en- 
_ lightened spirits not give us some light on the problems 
of conduct, of education, of philosophy? I should like 
to know the truth as to the relations of the mind and the 
brain, what thought is occupied with over there, etc. 

5. Most of the reputed phenomena of Spiritism that 
are not deliberate frauds are capable of nearer explana- 
tions. The physical phenomena are illusory interpreta- 
tions of physical facts that do not require the invocation 
of spirits. The psychical phenomena, such as the com- 
munication of things unknown either to the medium or 
the sitter, are probably the results of forgotten impres- 
sions, coming up when attention is in abeyance through 
associations in the subconscious mind. Any scientific 
theory of the relation of the mind and the brain must still 
be stated largely in terms of our ignorance. But one 
thing we do know—no stimulus, however faint, no feeling 
or thought or incipient act, however unnoticed and un- 
placed and undated by consciousness, fails to leave its 


328 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


trace on that most marvelously sensitized and complex of 
all recorders, the brain. The latter records billionfold 
impressions and makes billionfold connections between 
them. Most of these do not rise clearly into consciousness 
in our normal waking life, because our attention leads 
the memory process to run on the single track which is 
headed towards the achievement of our purposes. But, 
in dreaming and daydreaming, in delirium and intoxica- 
tion, attention being in abeyance, all manner of subcon- 
scious associations come into play. Furthermore, there 
is a fallacy to which we are all prone in some degree. 
And the degree of our proneness marks the degree of our 
credulity. It is what logicians call the neglect of negative 
unstances. We jump greedily at whatever seems to sup- 
port our belief, desire, prejudice or whim. We overlook 
and turn our backs on whatever contravenes these personal 
attitudes. One warning dream, one lucky hit of a sooth- 
sayer, will lead the strongly predisposed to turn his back 
on ten thousand failures of dreams or predictions or writ- 
ings with ouija boards. 

6. Finally, I doubt whether preoccupation with Spir- 
itism is good for the intellectual or moral health of the 
soul. It takes an unusually critical and well-poised mind 
to mix much in such things without being thrown off his 
balance. These matters should be investigated by compe- 
tent psychologists and physiologists. As to the moral 
value of trafficking in Spiritism I will quote only one 
authority: “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, 
neither will they be persuaded though one rise from the 
dead.” 

Rightly interpreted the consideration of the whole 
spectacle of life justifies a reasonable faith in immortality 





IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 329 


in the sense that what is most creative and valuable in 
the human personality will endure and go forward after 
death. For this is a living and creative universe. In it 
death is but a critical phase in the march of creative life. 
The whole panorama of our world, from the primeval star 
dust which became fitted to be the theater of life, up 
through the unicellular organisms in the steamy primeval 
waters, through invertebrate and saurian and bird and 
mammal to man, is the ascent of life towards higher and 
more creative individuality. The nervous system did not 
exist at all in the lowest organisms. Then came simple feel- 
ing in connection with simple nervous ganglia and fibers. 
Then appeared a central brain mass and more complex 
reactions indicative of dawning perception and memory. 
Then appeared the marvelously complex brain of man, 
fitted to be the instrument for recording, compounding 
and reacting to the stimuli of the environment and to be 
the instrument of creative imagination, thought and moral 
feeling. 

If some one tells me that this evolution proves that 
the spirit or mind of man (I do not distinguish them 
here) is the by-product of the nervous system and, 
since this is material, the mind of man is the by-prod- 
uct of matter, I answer that mere matter accounts 
for nothing creative. Creation wmplies energy, and the 
richer and more complex the creation the richer and 
more complex the creator. Ife is creatwe. Mind ts 
the highest potency of creative life. Life grows 
and reproduces itself with variations. But the merely 
physical or natural life dies in creating its children. Mind 
does not die, but rather recreates itself in creating thought, 
truth, beauty, goodness, love. “He that loseth his life 


330 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


shall find it” is a literal truth, true in science, in art, as 
well as in morals and social life. Mind creates all the 
forms of culture—morals and social order, arts and sci- 
ences, philosophies and religions. And in creating these 
forms it is not dying but living more fully, realizing its 
potencies more completely. 

From the physical or natural individuality of man 
comes, through participation in the creative work of hu- 
man culture, the spiritual personality. The human ani- 
mal is transformed into the thinker who can scorn delights 
and live laborious days in devotion to truth; into the 
artist who foregoes animal goods and worldly profits that, 
in obedience to his creative impulse, the Divine in him, 
he may body forth for the delight of other human souls 
without number, forms of beauty and grandeur; into the 
saint and lover of his kind, who, in spending his life and 
powers to enrich human life in those things which are 
lovely and of good report, enriches his own soul-life. 

In this creative universe nothing that is of value in the 
creative process can perish. In this creative universe that 
which is most fully creative must be most enduring. And 
that is most obviously mind when incited and guided in 
its work by the impulse to create and to impart freely to 
other minds that which it has created. 

Here on earth mind and brain are interdependent. 
Here the creative power works through its given instru- 
ment. If the instrument be defective the work is ineffec- 
tive. But the instrument is not identical with the user of 
it. When the instrument is worn out the creative user 
thereof can surely get a better one. Clearly the mind 
influences the body and the body the mind. If we ask, 
Whence come the incitements and plans of action, the 





IMMORTALITY AND SCIENCE 331 


purposes, visions, dreams and daring adventures on which 
man sets out forever and forever? the answer is obvious. 
These things which stir the body to action are mind 
engendered, mind created. Without the mind the body 
does next to nothing. The entire history and the present 
problems and outlook of human civilization are creations 
of mind or spirit. How absurd it is to suppose that the 
individualized power which is the highest reach of crea- 
tiveness in this living universe can pass into nothingness! 
This power is the rational ethical spirit—personality. 

Why, then, do we know so little in regard to the future 
conditions and forms of spiritual existence? Because 
our present duty and opportunity is Here and Now; to 
make this present day and hour as full of value as is 
possible; to make life instinct with beauty, harmony and 
joy in the inward parts and in all social relations into 
which we enter; to spend ourselves in the creation and 
spread of beauty, truth, justice and fellowship. Thus do- 
ing our parts in this creative universe in the faith that 
whatsoever is worthy to endure will endure. 


CHAPTER XXX 
RELIGION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 


The belief in the progressive perfectibility of man, and 
his actual development towards perfection, through the 
increase of scientific knowledge and its applications, 
through improvement in education and social organiza- 
tion, is a modern notion. Francis Bacon was the prophet 
of human progress through science in his New Atlantis. 
Various Frenchmen, from Jean Bodin in 1656 and the 
Abbé de Saint Pierre to Condorcet in 1793, formulated 
doctrines of man’s continuous progress through the im- 
provement of social culture. Auguste Comte, with his 
famous doctrine of intellectual development as being the 
condition of social progress, announced himself the in- 
augurator of the new era—an era in which, by the posi- 
tive study of the facts of social organization and the 
discovery of the correlations of social phenomena and 
their development, and under the guiding star of love 
for humanity, a perfected state of human society would 
finally arrive. 

G. W. F. Hegel described the dialectical march of the 
Divine Idea through history culminating in the God 
state, in which men should enjoy that personal freedom 
which consists in the harmony of the individual will with 
the social will embodied in the observances and institu- 
tions of the state. He glorified the state as the supreme 

302 





RELIGION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 333 


moral power and subordinated the Church and other moral 
institutions to it. He seems to have thought that the 
divine state had already attained realization in the Ger- 
manic state, especially in Prussia. 

In England and America the doctrine was hitched on 
to the theory of biological evolution. Herbert Spencer, 
its most voluble and influential exponent, taught that, by 
the inexorable and beneficent necessity of a great cos- 
mical law, society was marching towards an industrial 
age in which social authority would be more and more 
decentralized and in which, by the operation of the nat- 
ural laws of evolution, man’s egoistic and altruistic im- 
pulses would finally come into a perfect equilibrium. 

The vulgar form.of the belief in progress in England 
and America, especially in America, has been that prog- 
ress consists In inventing and using more machinery, 
producing more material goods, increasing the population 
regardless of its quality, increasing wealth, multiplying 
physical and sensuous wants and the means for their 
satisfaction, making education (in diluted and incoherent 
forms) accessible to all, making art cheap and vulgar, 
spreading the circulation of newspapers, popular maga- 
zines and inartistic literature. 

In short the vulgar idea of progress is that it consists 
in quantity production of material goods, human beings, 
minds, words and everything else. Progress is furthered 
by the increase of inventions, mechanical devices, creature 
comforts, means of rapid locomotion and communication. 

The obverse of this vulgar progressism is—the tyranny 
of the unthinking crowd, the rapid growth of ugly cities, 
the cheapening of all artistic endeavor, the decline of any 
genuine educational ideals, the bankruptcy of thought, 


*% 


3384 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


the increase of economic conflicts between capital and 
labor, the growth of political cowardice and corruption 
and the growing inefficiency of social administration. 

The course of events has so completely refuted Comte, 
Hegel, and Spencer that one need waste no words on their 
theories now. The Great War and the postwar confusion 
and disorder have shaken the faith of even the most super- 
ficial-minded in the all-sufficiency and beneficence of the 
quantity ideal of progress. It is being generally recog- 
nized that a human millennium is not the inevitable result 
of quantity production and increasing acceleration. 

Social reconstruction is in the air everywhere. But 
what does it mean? What should society aim at? And 
how may it achieve its ends? The answers to these ques- 
tions constitute a veritable Babel. We are beginning to 
see that material progress may go on for a time coinci- 
dently with mental and spiritual retrogression. But after 
this latter restrogression has accumulated to a critical 
point there is bound to come a social disintegration which 
will wreck even the results of material progress. 

We still have faith in physical science, especially in its 
economic applications. Our great men are those who 
amass fortunes, through applying and exploiting me- 
chanical devices to meet the universal desires for mechani- 
cal speed and sensuous well-being. A large part of our 
population thinks that a universal purveyor of some 
cheap mechanical device proves by his success therein his 
capacity to be an oracle on government and education and 
even on the soul, theology and metaphysics. In the mean- 
time the problems of civilization grow more complex and 
difficult. The pace becomes swifter. The burdens of 
social organization and administration seem already to 





RELIGION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 335 


exceed the capacity of a wholly industrialized society to 
meet them. There is an ever growing multiplication of 
inferior stocks of humanity who, in this democratic age, 
are getting “instruction” or “information,” but are not 
being educated, and are acquiring money, power and in- 
fluence. Family life is decaying rapidly. There is a 
general absence of moral courage and clean-cut and hard 
thinking on the part of our leaders. No intelligent public 
man believes to-day in pure democracy and no public man 
dares to express his disbelief in public. Ways for killing 
time and killing human beings have multiplied greatly in 
number and efficiency. There has been no increase in 
thoughtfulness, intellectual and moral independence, or 
rational self-determination, Great sums are raised for 
education and other forms of charity, but the result is 
not an increase in the proportionate number of rational 
self-respecting and self-determining human individuals. 
The opportunities for the individual to spend his time 
and energy and means are ever multiplying, but his capac- 
ity to make use of these opportunities wisely shows no in- 
crease. 

Unquestionably, if we define social progress as consist- 
ing in the increase of a knowledge of the facts of physical 
nature and their correlations, improvement in instruments 
for the study of physical nature and of machines for 
the manufacture and distribution of physical things, in- 
crease of social records, multiplication of poor books and 
magazines, and the widespread dissemination of odds and 
ends of information and misinformation, of facts “that 
ain’t so’? and of wild theories, then there has been and 
is still going on great social progress in the modern 
world, especially in these United States, 


336 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


But these things do not constitute social progress in 
the ethical and spiritual sense. The only meaning that 
social progress can bear, from the standpoint of ethics 
and spiritual religion, is the increase of individuals in 
rational self-control and self-determination, in the power 
of clear, consistent and independent thinking, in the spirit 
of justice, fair play, fellowship and codperation. The 
highest type of human being is one who is rationally 
conscientious, impersonally just, courageously loyal to 
ideals and who loves his neighbor in deed as much as he 
loves himself. 

Religion is not tied up with the belief in an inevitable 
social progress by any automatic law, either a Hegelian or 
Comtian idealistic law or a Spencerian naturalistic law. 
Indeed the belief in such a law is unethical. For it really 
denies the spiritual freedom and responsibility of indi- 
viduals. And, making God identical with an immanent 
and necessary law of progress, it reduces the reality of 
the spiritual order to an impersonal principle of growth. 
It puts the perfect reality at the end of an endless proc- 
ess. Infinite or unending progress is a contradiction in 
terms. If there be progress it must have a goal, a term, a 
standard. Furthermore, to assert that the perfect spir- 
itual Reality 7s not now but ts becoming is both to deny 
that there is now any perfect Reality and to affirm that 
it will come into being by the operation of some automatic 
mechanical principle. 

Whether one name the supposed ultimate subject of 
perfection, towards which all progress moves, the Idea of 
Humanity or the Absolute Idea, the ethical outcome is 
the same. The individual members of the living genera- 
tion are regarded merely as transitory contributors to a 





RELIGION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 337 


good that always is to be, but never is. Tor this non- 
existent and impersonal Good each successive generation 
is regarded as a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water. 
The notion of an infinitely remote goal of progress, to 
which all the living generations are in turn sacrificed, in 
order that there might be a little closer approximation to 
the ever-receding goal, would be unethical and irreligious, 
even though such an Infinite Goal were not nonsense, 
which it is. For there can be no real measure of progress 
unless there be a definite end. 

Lotze speaks of the Idea of Humanity as “the great 
and awful and tragic altar on which all individual joy 
and life is sacrificed to the development of the universal 
idea of humanity.” He says, further, “He who sees in 
history the development of an Idea is bound to say whom 
this development benefits or what benefit is realized by 
it” (Microcosmus, II, p. 161). “If personal life be but 
a stage in the development of an impersonal absolute we 
should cease our efforts, or—in case we held fast the treas- 
ures of love, duty and self-sacrifice—we should have to 
confess to ourselves that a human heart in all its finitude 
and transitoriness is incomprehensibly nobler and richer 
and more exalted than that absolute with all its logically 
necessary development” (Mzcrocosmus, 167-168). To 
regard as the goal of progress even the moral perfection 
of the race is an illusory notion. Only individual per- 
sons are the bearers of moral values. The moral improve- 
ment of the race can consist only in the participation of a 
growing proportion of individuals in the realization of 
moral perfection. 

It is equally fatuous to argue that it makes no dif- 
ference what becomes of individual selves, provided only 


338 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


that the spiritual values partially realized by them endure. 
For spiritual values can have no reality, and therefore 
no endurance, apart from personal spirits. 

The notion that the goal of progress may be realized 
some day by the perfection, through social culture, of the 
human race here on earth is a visionary ideal. So long 
as man remains man, a being with conflicting impulses 
and a dual nature, he will be subject to error, sin, and 
suffering. There are no discoverable means by which 
man can escape this lot. No perfection of physical or 
administrative or educational machinery will turn this 
earth into a sensuous and moral paradise. The cen- 
tury of most rapid progress (so-called) has ended in 
a holocaust of destruction, disillusionment and con- 
fusion. 

The doctrines of a necessary and ever increasing prog- 
ress reveal a strange blindness to the actual constitution 
of human nature. Each new generation of human beings, 
even with the best social heritage, has to work out for 
itself its own moral vocation, has to take its destiny into 
its own hands. No generation can save another genera- 
tion from its moral struggles. The present living genera- 
tion never learns much from history. It must fight its 
own spiritual battles. Since the moral vocation of man 
is to grow into the stature of moral and rational self- 
determinating personality through trial and error, struggle 
and suffering, each generation, as Leopold von Ranke said, 
as ummediate to God. In other words, the individual 
members of each living generation must work out their 
own destinies and find the divine meaning of life, experi- 
ence, salvation for themselves. They are not mere links 
in an endless chain. ach is called to be a son of the 





| 
| 


RELIGION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 339 


Most High, to work out his own salvation with fear and 
trembling. 

From the standpoint of ethics and spiritual religion all 
the material and cultural achievements of civilization, the 
entire social heritage of discoveries, inventions, arts, sci- 
ences, laws, and administrative, political and educational 
devices are mere scaffoldings and trappings for the spirit 
of man. Man must beware lest he lose his soul amidst 
the accumulation of cultural accouterments. These things 
have value only as means to enable him to grow into the 
fullness of moral personality. The true measure of social 
progress, the one touchstone of a culture, is this—how 
far does it enable its living members to become and live 
as self-respecting self-determining, spiritually harmonious, 
just, integral and loving persons, faithful to right and 
duty in the fellowship of persons? The interest of re- 
lgion and ethics in social progress lies here and here 
alone. or religion that alone has value which promotes 
the spiritual well-being of persons as individual members 
of the ideal community. The only concern that ethical 
religion has with the externals, the material and adminis- 
trative trappings of civilization is this—do these promote 
or retard the development and free play of the human 
soul in spiritual harmony, freedom and love? 

The end of progress is not progress but the laying hold 
on eternal life by the individual soul. But eternal life 
is not some future state that we shall be ushered into 
miraculously at death. Eternal life, in the Gospels, does 
not mean timeless life or hfe after entering a different 
world but everlasting or enduring life; a life of intrinsic 
and peace-giving value which may be entered upon here 
and now. 


340 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


Here we seem to be strangers and sojourners, and to 
have no continuing city. At best we catch fugitive 
glimpses now and here of the true and eternal life, realize 
it fragmentarily and interruptedly. Man’s true destiny 
is to live in the Beyond that is within, but this Beyond 
lies, in potency, within man’s life here and now. We 
are not to sit with folded hands and wait patiently for 
death, so that we may enter upon eternal life. It is our 
birthright now and here, wherever a human soul lives and 
strives. 

Jesus lived and taught and wrought and died to usher 
in the reign of justice and love which he looked to come 
on earth in the near future. To live and teach and work 
and if need be to die in his spirit in order to make his 
ideal prevail over the stupid selfishness, the pharisaism 
and mammon worship of the present is the true imitation 
of Jesus. His gospel is a social gospel. It would substi- 
tute for acquisition, as the ruling motive for work, service ; 
for greed, spending for others; for hate, love; for envy, 
sympathy; for self-centered individualism, fellowship. 

The whole purport of Jesus’ teaching and work is to 
open up to men the way to a richer, fuller, more har- 
monious Infe. “I am come that ye might have life and 
have it more abundantly.” He dealt not in negations and 
prohibitions, but in affirmations and positive insights. 
His entire gospel revolves around the concept of Life, an 
integrated, single-minded, whole-hearted Life which pul- 
sates in the individual soul and flows out in service, sym- 
pathy and love to other individuals, returning to itself 
manifold enriched. He came to liberate the imprisoned 
- urge of creative joy and fullness of life in his fellow 
men. 





RELIGION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 341 


His disciples felt this. The crowd felt it. Thus they 
responded to him, because he opened up life to them. 
Through the Epistles of St. Paul runs the same trium- 
phant note—the sense of a richer, more abundant, more 
harmonious and enduring life—the life Eternal. ‘For 
this is eternal life, to know thee, the only true God and 
Jesus Christ.” “For me to live is Christ and to die is 
gain.” 

And the Father for Jesus is the inexhaustible fountain 
of creative and loving life, ever manifesting itself, ever 
spending itself. | 

Jesus’ intimate sense of the Father springs out of the 
utter integrity, the wholeness, the harmony and power of 
the life-urge in himself. 

We come back to Jesus and Paul. “The kingdom of 
heaven is within you. In my Father’s house are many 
mansions. I go to prepare a place for you that where I 
am you may be, also.” 

_ The “world to come” (better translated, “age to come’’) 
for Jesus was a new order, a new age, to come on earth, 
a Kingdom of God to be established in the near future 
and of which he was the herald. It has never come in 
the way in which he, perhaps, expected its advent. But 
we are true disciples and are laboring in his spirit when 
we work to establish here on earth a better copy of his 
Ideal Commonwealth of Mansoul by using all the means 
at our disposal. “The letter killeth but the spirit maketh 
alive.” Faith and service and life in the spiritual order 
should not make for indifference to worldly culture. The 
very infinitude and transcendence of the spirit or life 
in man over all material, economic and worldly cultural 


342 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


concerns demands that these latter things shall be made 
to serve the spirit in man. 


It is no part of my present purposes to estimate in 


detail the virtues and vices of the present social and 
economic order. I am concerned here simply to insist 
that the criterion or measure of social progress in the 
world of economic goods, and scientific, artistic and edu- 
cational interests lies in their values as instruments for 
the upbuilding of mah’s moral and spiritual personality 
as a member of the fellowship of moral personalities which 
is the Kingdom of God on earth. 

The nearer approach to the realization of this ideal can 
be made by taking hold of the actual and possible goods 
of our existing culture and using them as means for the 
advancement of the common good. Let us first consider 
what are the goods of our present civilization. I shall 
here attempt only a brief enumeration of these. 

1. Its large and increasing capital of scientific knowl- 
edge and its applications. These are giving to men a 
much more effective and extended control over natural 
forces that are being used, and can to a much greater 
extent be used, to increase leisure and improve health and 
physical well-being. 

During the past century much more progress has been 
made in the advancement of physical knowledge and its 
applications than in the advancement of our knowledge of 
human nature and its applications. The twentieth century 
can be, if we will to have it so, a century of great prog- 
ress in our knowledge of human nature and its social 
applications. We are already entering upon an era of 
rapid progress in human physiology and psychology. It 
is not too much to expect that the intensive cultivation 





RELIGION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 343 


of the psychology of human behavior will bear fruitful 
and almost revolutionary applications in education and 
social administration. A new social ethics is the indis- 
pensable guide to educational, economic and administra- 
tive reconstruction. This new social ethics will be based 
on the psychology of man’s native powers; and on social 
psychology, which will determine the laws of action and 
reaction between man’s congenital endowments and the 
stimuli and patterns supplied by his social environment. 
The pioneer work being done in these fields is only the 
earnest of more to follow. 

2. This new era in the social sciences will be aided by 
the increasing facilities for the dissemination of knowl- 
edge and the widening power of education. Free or tax- 
supported education, from the primary grade to the 
college, is the great instrument for the fulfillment of the 
democratic dream of equality of opportunity. 

The enrichment of our heritage of knowledge, especially 
in the social sciences, and the increase of leisure and 
opportunity will mean an enlarged field for the free play 
of human individuality. 

When we have taken stock of all our present social 
disabilities and disorders it remains true that this in- 
dustrial and scientific age, with its fluid and experimental 
spirit, means a society better able to withstand stresses 
and strains, having more power of adaptation and read- 
justment than any type known to history. 

For these reasons one need not despair of the future 
of our civilization. It is recuperating from the diseases 
of the prewar period and the war. Readjustment is dif- 
ficult and slow. But the Cassandras who prophesy its 
doom fix their eyes on its defects and are blind to the 


344 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


forces that make for its continuance and progress towards 
health. 

This continuance and progress will depend upon the 
following conditions of the good life, as outlined in these 
pages, being effectually achieved. 


1. Every individual must be nurtured in a healthful - 


and decent physical environment and, in his plastic years 
of childhood and youth, be given a sound physical develop- 
ment. Great minds have functioned in sickly bodies, but 
it is a poor investment for society to proceed upon the 
assumption that good minds and characters will every- 
where and always flourish against untoward physical 
hindrances. 

2. Every individual must have free access to all the 
educational opportunities for growth in mind and char- 
acter that he can use. These must include, not only 
training in the elements of language, science, civics and 
practical ethics, but as well the cultivation of the imagina- 
tion and the feelings through literature and the fine arts 
and through contact with the personalities and teachings 
of the race’s spiritual heroes. 

3. Upon reaching maturity, the individual must have 
the opportunity to train himself for, and to practice, a 
vocation in which either he can find personal self-expres- 
sion; or, if not this, a vocation in which the hours and 
conditions of work will leave him sufficient time and en- 
ergy to express his normal idiosyncrasies during his 
leisure. 

4, The individual must be able to earn sufficient by his 
service to society to live decently and, if a married man 
or a widower with children, to support his family. The 
same principle applies to widowed mothers. 





ee Ee 


RELIGION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 345 


These are the irreducible minima of a social order that 
recognizes the fundamental ethical and Christian prin- 
ciple of the inherent and absolute worth of human per- 
sonality. In so far as society makes this recognition 
effective it is ethical and Christian and is the realization 
in this world of space and time of the Kingdom of God. 
In so far as it fails it is evil and the Kingdom of Satan. 

It is a gross misreading and misapplication of the 
spiritual urge of the human soul, as interpreted in re- 
ligion, to say that, since the spirit of man can never be 
wholly satisfied with earthly things, therefore it is right 
to deny to any man the fullest opportunity for spiritual 
self-realization here and now. For the Spiritual Beyond 
is Within, the Transcendent and Eternal Values of Life 
are to be laid hold on now and here. This is eternal 
life—to realize in its fullness moral and spiritual integrity 
or wholeness and harmony of life as a member of the 
Infinite Order of Moral Personalities. As Kant put it, 
the Kingdom of God is the Commonwealth of the King- 
dom of Persons who are ends-in-themselves, that is, 
Spiritual Individuals. As a greater than Kant said, “the 
kingdom of God is within you.” Within the souls of 
men are great possibilities of spiritual richness and 
strength, of power and joy, that await a more just and 
humane social order to blossom into living actualities. 
Jesus, it 1s said, appealed to individuals. He stressed 
the individuality of the soul. This is true, but it is 
equally true that the life he wished men to lead is one 
of communion and fellowship, of mutual service and love. 
It is equally true that he ever sought and elicited the 
hidden or repressed and thwarted impulses, thus making 
for wholeness and fullness and harmony in individuals 


346 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


outcast, despised, downtrodden. ‘For when he saw the 
multitudes he had compassion on them.” 

He offered no specific plans for education or economic 
reconstruction or political reform. For such plans must 
be devised to meet the changing conditions of every era. 
He came to awaken men to a livelier sense of the enormous 
possibilities of life latent in the human soul. But every 
means of science or practical administration that we can 
find and use, to bring wholeness, fullness and harmony 
of life among all souls has the sanction of his spirit and 
attitude. 





CHAPTER XXXxXI 
RELIGION AND THE STATE 


We have to-day a perplexing situation in regard to the 
ethics of man’s social allegiances. The national state, 
the corporate and organized political life in which the 
individual is a member, claims his unqualified allegiance. 
He owes to it duties, since he owes to it whatever personal 
and family rights he enjoys—the right of property, of 
personal safety, of good name. He owes to it the oppor- 
tunity for education and for many other goods. On the 
other hand, he owes ethical allegiance to the universally 
human spiritual life witnessed to by the church. He 
owes allegiance to the cause of free human culture through 
science, letters and art. 

A man has, also, moral obligations to the vocational 
group—professional, industrial or commercial—of which 
he is a member and through which he gets his living. 

And his moral obligations to the state may come into 
conflict with his obligations to his vocational group or 
with his obligations as a Christian and a human being. 

In ancient civilization these conflicts seldom arose. For 
the religious group and the state were coterminous. The 
religions of Greece and Rome were religions of the city 
state. The ethical code was the code of the city state 
until the spirit of critical reflection set in with the age 
of the Sophists. But, even after that, Socrates, Plato 

347 


348 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


and Aristotle conceived the area of ethical culture and 
practice to be identical with the city state. Socrates was 
condemned to death as a bad citizen. 

Similarly, in Israel the state and the church were co- 
terminous until the fall of the state, when the church 
became the sole bearer of the race’s moral life. 

It was first among the Stoics and the Christians that 
the idea arose of an ethical order that burst through all 
racial and political boundaries. The rise and spread of 
the Stoic universalistic ethics was contemporaneous with 
the ruin of the Greek city states. The rise and spread of 
Christianity was contemporaneous with the development 
of Roman Imperialism, which engulfed all the small states 
and included a great variety of races and cultures within 
its domain. After the downfall of the Roman Empire, 
the Church became the one all-embracing cultural and 
ethical organization and claimed to be the source of what- 
ever ethical authority the state might be allowed to 
wield. © 

All was changed by the advent of the modern national 
state as an independent political, economic and cultural 
unit. The principle, established by the religious wars of 
the Reformation period, that religion should follow the 
ruler made the state supreme over religious organizations. 
Political thinkers like Machiavelli, Hobbes, or even Locke 
did not admit that religion should be entirely independent 
of state control. Locke, the advocate of religious tolera- 
tion, drew the line at atheists. Furthermore, the radical 
thinkers who prepared the way for the French Revolution 
reacted against the political power of the Church to the 
point of making religion wholly subservient to the state. 
Rousseau’s deism was to be recognized by the state 





RELIGION AND THE STATE 349 


The political state is, in our world to-day the sovereign 
form of social organization. ‘There is no activity or in- 
terest of the individual or of other groups over which it 
does not claim and exercise control. Notwithstanding 
the criticisms of these political pluralists who maintain 
that the unitary state fails to function and who would, as 
in the case of certain guild socialists, substitute, for a 
single central social governmental authority, exercising 
legislative judicial and administrative functions, a plur- 
ality of functional groups or guilds representing the great 
industrial and other economic activities of society, it does 
not appear how the central authority of the political state 
can be dispensed with “because of the hardness of men’s 
hearts.” Indeed, guild socialists, such as Mr. G. D. H. 
Cole, do recognize that even a pluralistic distribution of 
power on a functional basis will still require a central 
government as arbiter in the interests of the people as 
consumers and subjects for cultural activities. The 
syndicalists, who are anarchists, would abolish the state. 

In medieval Europe the two great contending social 
powers were the Church and the State—the Empire and 
the Papacy. The Papacy won for a time and suppressed 
intellectual and spiritual liberty. The modern world is 
characterized by the supremacy of the national state, with 
the church in most cases, until quite recent times, a part 
of the state. Even the Roman Catholic Church has had 
to acquiesce in the separation of Church and State when 
it has not had to submit to seeing, as in England, another 
church established. But it has never admitted the moral 
right of the state to control education; nor, indeed, the 
moral independence of the state over against the church. 
Western civilization is now committed to the separation 


850 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


of Church and State and apparently to state control of 
education. 

In the meantime, other groups than the church are 
challenging the all-sufficiency, the omnicompetence of the 
state. Organized labor does not admit the right of the 
state to issue injunctions and to use its own police power 
to suppress or control strikes. Organized capital, in the 
form of trusts and combines, has fought strenuously — 
against state regulation. 

Meanwhile the power of the state grows by the logie of 
events. The collectivistic character of our great indus- 
trialized society, the increasing economic interdependence 
of its constituent groups and the growing demand for 
collective action and regulation in industry, education, 
health, road building and many other activities, have led 
to the practical abandonment of the older lberal theory 
that the state exists only as a police power to protect the 
individual in the exercise of his natural rights. More 
and more the state extends its functions. It is becoming 
a positive cultural agency, as well as an economic and 
legal agency for the furtherance of the common weal. 
It makes and enforces laws to restrain vice, to regulate 
industrial and labor combinations, to promote education 
and the means of communication, as well as the production 
and distribution of goods. The national state is fast 
becoming a great economic and cultural agency. It 
demands increasing service and loyalty from individuals 
and groups. 

The national state, so magnified in its economic and 
cultural activities, is a source of grave danger as well as 
a fountain of good. War is due chiefly to the conflicting 
economic interests of modern states, to the hypertrophy 





RELIGION AND THE STATE 351 


of nationalism through the growth in the direct economic 
interests of the national states. The World War undoubt- 
edly originated chiefly in the supposed clash of economic 
and cultural interests between the great states. Thus the 
development of the national state has brought a great 
danger to peace. 

Furthermore, the conflicts of group interests within the 
state keep the nation in a condition of internal unstable 
equilibrium. In times of peace the motive of patriotism 
is insufficient to prevent incessant internecine conflict 
between economic groups with divergent interests. The 
individual’s sense of citizenship will not prevent him from 
regarding his own national state, or a subdivision thereof, 
as an instrument whose primary use is to safeguard and 
advance the interests of his own economic group. This 
holds true both of capitalistic and labor groups. Further- 
more, the bending of the power of the state in subservience 
to the advancement of economic group interests is a chief 
cause of war. War to-day is the by-product of the compe- 
tition of powerful capitalistic groups, organized under the 
protection of the national state and using the state as an 
agency for the promotion of markets, the obtaining of 
concessions and other favors in the international arena. 

The patriotic motive in our own country is made the 
cloak for the cultivation and expression of racial and 
religious antipathies. Witness the Ku Klux Klan, which, 
under the guise of one hundred per cent Americanism, is 
using the ballot, as well as unlawful means, to exclude 
Jews, Negroes and Catholics from the enjoyment of the 
privileges of citizenship. 

The state in itself, notwithstanding the goods it fur- 
thers through the maintenance of law and order and the 


352 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


furtherance of economic justice and opportunity and even 
of health and education, fails by itself alone to humanize 
and universalize the motives of its citizens. It fails to 
"prevent economic, racial and sectarian conflicts. It fails 
to maintain international peace. Patriotism is not only 
sometimes the last refuge of scoundrels. It turns too 
easily into sectarian rancor, economic injustice and special 
pleading, and international jingoism. Patriotism must 
be cleansed and sublimated by a spiritual conviction which 
is humanitarian and universal in its motives and stand- 
ards of value. The basis of a genuinely ethical patriotism 
must be found in a universally human vision and devotion. 

The religion of humanity has been offered as supplying 
this need. In many respects it is admirable. Its central 
guiding principle is devotion to the universal human 
values. It stresses the inherent value of man as man, the 
worth of human nature as the end or standard of value 
for conduct and social order. It sets up, as the object of 
worship and of the dedication of the will and the mind, 
the furtherance of the welfare of man. It presents as 
the Great Being the ideal of Humanity, past, present and 
future. In these respects its ethical ideal or standard of 
value is that of Stoicism and early Christianity. (The 
reader is reminded that the ethical motives and ideals of 
Stoicism and Christianity were fundamentally the same. 
Indeed, the Stoic strain of thought is very marked in the 
New Testament, especially in the writings of Paul.) Short 
of faith in the cosmic supremacy of spiritual values, the 
religion of humanity is the noblest and most generous 
vision of humane ideals. 

But the religion of humanity falls short. For it sets 
up as the object of worship and service an abstraction 





RELIGION AND THE STATE 353 


and is all too human. What is Humanity? Is it the 
sum of human individuals, past and present, and to come ? 
The individuals to come are nonexistent. The individuals 
past are equally nonexistent, unless the life of humanity 
be grounded and conserved in the Cosmic Life, unless the 
past is not past but somehow lives now in the Eternal 
Spirit. One can scarcely regard the actual living genera- 
tion of human beings as a wholly satisfying object of 
worship; or as supplying a sufficient standard of value 
and inspiring motive for the noblest conduct. 

No, man’s life, with its weal and ill, is part of the 
Cosmical Life—Man’s spirit cannot flourish apart from 
faith in, dependence on, communion with the Cosmic 
Spirit. That which lifts man out of the turmoil, con- 
fusion, despair and vanity of his noisy years is communion 
with the Eternal Spirit. Human goodness, in aspiration 
and achievement, must sicken and wither without the faith 
that reposes on a Superhuman Goodness. Limit human 
aspiration, endeavor and devotion to the merely human 
and it becomes less than human. For this is the supreme 
and paradoxical truth of the human lot—the most truly 
human is more than human. And if more than human 
then it is rooted and grounded in the Cosmical Order. 
If there be no absolute truth in the faith that our highest 
goodness, love and beauty bring us nearest to the Eternal 
and Divine, then goodness, love and beauty are but de- 
ceptive phantoms, will-o’-the-wisps. There must be an 
eternal unity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. The ulti- 
mate meaning of the Cosmos must imply that; neither 
the impersonal and disinterested quest for truth in regard 
to nature, man and their relations; nor the sense of 
beauty through which man feels the kinship of his soul 


354 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


with nature; nor the creative impulse which leads him ~ 


to body forth new forms of beauty in color, form and 
sound; nor the indomitable striving of his will for justice ; 
nor the unquenchable longing of his soul for love and 
fullness of life and joy; are homeless in the universe. 
Ethical religion demands that the social order and the 
political state shall be made more truly instrumental to 
the perfecting of the human soul than they are now or 
ever have been. But neither now nor ever will these 
earthly social orders measure up fully to the striving and 
the aspiration of the soul. Only a spiritual religion, 
which takes up into itself and synthesizes into one living 
whole all the scientific and historical truth that man can 
find, all healthy and harmonious experiences of beauty, 
all the insights and effectuations of justice and, beyond 
and transcending these, all the love and spiritual power 
and joy that the human soul is capable of; only such a 
religion can satisfy the soul of man and, in so doing, make 
him always discontented with less than the more abundant 
life of righteousness, love, harmony, and beauty of spirit. 
“He that loveth is born of God and knoweth God.” 
A spiritual religion for to-day and to-morrow must be 
a Yea-sayer to every legitimate interest and value in 
human life. It must not deal in tabus and superstitious 
fears. It will include a reverent awe before the mysteries 
of life, but an open-minded and fearless regard for facts. 
It will honor and include all the great things of life— 
the love of man and woman, of parent and child, the 
friendship of neighbors and comrades, the spirit of ser- 
vice to one’s fellows, the devotion of the scientist and 
scholar, the joy in nature and the love of beautiful forms 
and sounds. It will recognize and use all science, art 





RELIGION AND THE STATE 305 


and speculation as means by which the soul of man is 
enfranchised of fear and baser motives, is enriched in the 
joy of harmonious feeling and clear and harmonious 
thinking. 

The state is destined to become, probably, more and 
more a great agency for furthering human welfare—a 
great cultural, and therefore a moral instrument. Human 
hfe is a living unity and cannot, without being ruined, 
be separated into water-tight compartments. Whatsoever 
promotes human well-being is a moral instrument. A 
state whose conduct is divorced from ethical principles 
becomes an instrument of evil. The evils of our gov- 
ernmental agencies are due, in the last analysis, to the 
attempt to divorce politics, legislation and administration 
from ethics. Organized society cannot endure the perma- 
nent separation of economics and law from ethics. It is 
essential to the realization of the good life that economic 
justice and the equalization of opportunity shall be fur- 
thered by all the means possible—by legislation and 
administration, by the extension of state activity in the 
economic order, by more efficient public educational and 
welfare agencies, including remedial care for defectives 
and delinquents and a great increase in preventive physical 
and mental hygiene. 

Thus the state is capable of being made into a much 
more effective agency for the realization of the good life. 
The liberation of public administration from the vicissi- 
tudes, the inefficiency and corruption that go with partisan 
control is absolutely essential. So long as departments 
of education and other public welfare agencies are subject 
to partisan political control we shall make no real prog- 
ress. These things must be put on a strictly civil service 


356 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


basis. To this end we must have generally diffused a 
more alert intelligence and moral passion, by which the 
state may be turned into a genuinely ethical and humane 
agency. 

The widespread diffusion of this public-minded intelli- 
gence and moral passion is the supreme social service that 
religion, in its corporate capacity, can render. The 
church must jealously. preserve its independence of state 
control. By a self-denying ordinance, it must refrain 
from participation in partisan politics. It must be above 
the battle. It must keep clear of all entangling alliances 
and stick to its sacred task, which is to serve as critic, guide 
and inspirer to a higher type of civic life. Religion, 
when it is loyal to its meaning and vocation as the supreme 
spiritual power, speaks with an authority higher than any 
social organization, higher than any state or any church 
—the authority of God, the Cosmic Spirit of Righteous- 
ness and Love, speaking through the human conscience 
and reason. ‘Thus, there is no duty more incumbent on 
religiously minded persons than to endeavor that the state 
and all its subdivisions, down to the smallest civic unit, 
shall become through all its agencies a sure instrument 
of human good. 

The invisible state, the ultimate spiritual state that is 
identical with the invisible church, is the international 
order of humankind. To make the visible states of the 
earth more and more the instruments of the spiritual 
state church is a paramount duty of religion. For true 
ethics and religion is at once personal and international. 
The universal principles of ethics and religion know no 
nationalistic boundaries. 

The church that limits its outlook, even in time of 





é a i — 





RELIGION AND THE STATE 357 


war, to its own nation is no Christian church. It is 
false to its origins. The first universal and cosmopolitan 
ethics was Stoicism, which emphasized both the inward 
and spiritual character of the good life, its personal na- 
ture, and the universality of moral relations. Indeed, 
these two principles—the inwardness or personal quality 
of moral values and their universality—are but the two 
poles of one principle, namely, that all intrinsic values 
inhere in persons. The stoic ethics and religion, blended 
with Neo-Platonism, was taken into Christianity and 
vitalized with a new dynamic emanating from the person 
of Jesus and the vision of the Kingdom revealed by 
him. 

The universally humane outlook of the Gospel was the 
master passion of its first great missionary, Paul, who 
dedicated his life to proclaiming to mankind the spiritual 
liberty, harmonizing power and universality of the Christ- 
spirit. Indeed, Paul, by taking up and fusing with the 
Christian principles of love and service the permanently 
valid insights of Stoicism and Neo-Platonism, became the 
second founder of Christianity. 

The duty and opportunity of the Christian church is 
plain. She can only regain her moral and spiritual su- 
premacy by reaffirming the regnancy of the universal 
moral values over every state and in every international 
relation. This is a tremendous task, which the Churches 
cannot achieve without some sort of working unity of 
effort. In principle the Roman Church is right, though 
in practice she has often been wrong because she has, 
owing to her fateful heritage from the Carolovingian and 
Hildebrandine ages, attempted to carry out the principle 
by using the weapons of worldly force. Of course the 


358 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


Protestant churches did the same in Reformation and 
post-Reformation days. | 

We are to render unto Cesar the things that are 
Cesar’s. But we must remember that these words were 
spoken by the founder of Christianity when Cesar sym- 
bolized a foreign and heathen power, with whom the 
enemies of Jesus were seeking to embroil him. They 
cannot be literally applied to-day. Our states are pro- 
fessedly committed to a humane ethics. They even claim 
to be Christian. They pay lip service to the name of 
Jesus. The duty of the Christian is plain. Cesar must 
be put in his place. In so far as the conduct of the 
state, especially in international concerns, is in clear 
violation of the ethics of Jesus, the Christian cannot be 
a one hundred per cent patriot. The principle, “my 
country right or wrong” is better than “my ego right or 
wrong”; but, from the Christian standpoint, it is im- 
moral and impious doctrine. In international, as intra- 
national affairs the Christian must put first the rights 
that follow from the inherent worth of human personality. 
There is neither Greek nor barbarian, Jew nor Gentile, 
bond nor free. For all are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. 

The earthly state is too much the creature of man’s 
economic greeds, of his individual and group selfishness, 
of his fierce competitions and rivalries, his craven fears 
and natural lusts, ever to be an adequate copy of the 
Heavenly State. It is too much to hope that an institu- 
tion based on force and maintained largely through the 
unstable equilibrium of its citizens’ baser motives can ever 
be made into a seemly likeness of the Kingdom of God. 
Law, police power, the power to tax and regulate the 
economic life, even when coupled with some effort to pro- 


—— 


RELIGION AND THE STATE 309 


mote the cultural welfare of its members, do not constitute 
spiritual forces and do not by themselves make for spir- 
itual goods. 

It is the Christian’s duty to do his best to make the 
state an instrument for the furtherance of the moral and 
cultural life of its members, a means for removing all 
the hindrances to the realization of the good life that can 
be removed through a political system. But the clear- 
sighted Christian will never expect too much from the 
state. He will look chiefly to the family, the school and 
the church for the fulfillment of all these goods that are 
beyond the scope of law and force. There has never been 
a really Christian state. The nearest approach to it was 
medieval Europe when the Hildebrandine Church ruled 
it. But the Church was corrupted by the possession of 
supreme temporal power. “They that take the sword 
shall perish by the sword.’ The nobler and sweeter 
motives, the qualities of self-control, service, self-sacrifice 
and love can not be nurtured by any other means than 
the spiritual influence of mature persons on immature 
persons. Education is the great instrument for the im- 
provement of human society. 

The dream of a day when the state shall function as 
the great spiritual agency is a daydream that will prob- 
ably never pass into a waking reality. Wherever two or 
three are gathered together in love and devotion to the 
service of their fellows and of truth, beauty, justice, fel- 
lowship and love, something ethically greater than the 
state is there in the midst of them. 

Higher and nobler than any visible state or ecclesiasti- 
eal organization is the Invisible Church which is the 
Invisible State. It is the spiritual community of dedi- 


360 RELIGION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY 


cated lives—of personalities living in devotion to whatso- 
ever things are pure, whatsoever things are true and what- 
soever things are lovely and of good report. It is the 
one communion and fellowship of those who are striving 
to live after the eternal pattern. For we have a building 
from God, a house not made with hands eternal in the 
heavens. ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his 
righteousness.” For the faithful who would serve the 
Highest Values this is no mere dream but the eternal 
reality. Of old time both Plato and Jesus taught men 
that the earthly goods, the spiritual values, which mundane 
society can realize, are but shadows and copies of the 
Eternal and Perfect Order of Truth, Beauty and Love. 
For Jesus and all who are touched by his spirit this 
Eternal Order is a Community, a Fellowship, of all who 
hunger and thirst after righteousness and love. The heart 
of Jesus’ gospel is that their hunger shall be satisfied, 
their thirst quenched. 

It matters not whether he supposed or not that the 
Kingdom should soon come to earth in all its power and 
glory by the miraculous act of God. What matters chiefly 
is that he proclaimed the eternal reality and supremacy 
of the one communion and fellowship and made the test 
of membership in that communion the fact that men had 
done acts of service, of mercy and love to the least of 
his brethren, even though they had not in the doing 
thought of him. 

Jesus’ tests of membership in the Kingdom are simple 
- to understand even though they be hard to follow. They 
have nothing to do with subscribing to and repeating one’s 
belief in old or new creeds, whether clothed in concrete 
sensuous images or in abstruse metaphysical terms. 





RELIGION AND THE STATE 361 


“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of 
these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” “He that 
heareth my words and doeth them, I will liken unto a 
man that builded his house on a rock.” “He that doeth 
the will shall know of the doctrine.” “By their fruits ye 
shall know them.” 


CONCLUSION 


I have in this book been at some pains to disentangle 
and state what I deem to be the essential message of 
Jesus and to put it into the setting of our thought and 
our problems to-day. but I would be the last to claim 
that any one who would practice the religion of Jesus must 
think in these terms. I have been concerned only to free 
the ethical import of the Gospel from unnecessary and 
out-worn 1mpedimenta. 

It has been said many times, and it cannot be said too 
often, that the best witness to Christianity is a Christlike 
hfe. This is the living rock, and not any system of 
dogmas and polities, ancient, medieval or modern. 

One can live the Christ life and discard the traditional 
dogmas. One can live the Christ life and be a theological 
and metaphysical agnostic. One can live the Christ life 
and swallow all the dogmas of medieval Catholicism. What 
matters above else, indeed, what alone matters is the ser- 
vice of one’s fellows in righteousness, integrity and love 
according to the mind of Christ. 


rm 





BIBLIOGRAPHY 


The following bibliography consists of carefully selected lists 
of books by recent and living authors on the main topies dis- 
cussed in the book. The most valuable works are asterisked. 
No attempt has been made at a complete bibliography. 


GENERAL WORKS 


*HAsTINGS, James, Editor, The Encyclopaedia of Religion and 
Ethics. 

*The Catholic Encyclopaedia. 

*The Jewish Encyclopaedia. 

Matruews, Shailer, and Smiru, G. Birney, A Dictionary of 
Religion and Ethics. 


I. Tot PsyrcHoLnoGy AND PHILOSOPHY oF RELIGION 


Ames, Edward §8., Psychology of Religious Experience. 

*AvuER, Felix, An Ethical Philosophy of Life. 

*Batrour, Arthur J., Theism and Humanism. 

Bourroux, Emile, Science and Religion in Contemporary Phi- 
losophy. 

*Brown, William Adams, The Essence of Christianity. Christian 
Theology in Outline. 

*CarirD, John, Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. Fun- 
damental Ideas of Christianity. 

*Cairp, Edward, The Evolution of Religion. 

*Cor, George Albert, Psychology of Religion. 

DURKHEIM, Emile, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. 

*KUCKEN, Rudolf, The Truth of Religion. 

EvucKkeEn, Rudolf, Christianity and the New Idealism. Can We 
Still Be Christians? 

*GaLLoway, George, The Philosophy of Religion. 

GARDNER, Perey, The Practical Basis of Christian Belief. 

*Hocxine, William E., The Meaning of God in Human Experi- 
ence. 


363 


364 BIBLIOGRAPHY 


*Horrpinc, Harold, Philosophy of Religion. 
*IncE, William Ralph, Outspoken Essays (2 volumes). 
JACKS, L. P., A Living Unierse. 
* JAMES, Willian, Varieties of Religious Raperience! 
JONES, Henry, A Faith that Enquires. 
JonESs, Rufus M., Editor, Religious Foundations. 
Kina, Irving, The Development of Religion. 
Leusa, James H., A Psychological Study of Religion. 
MacIntosH, Douglas C., Theology as an Empirical Science. 
MARTINEAU, James, A Study of Religion. 
Marruews, W. P., Studies in Christian Philosophy. 
*PrattT, James B., The Religious Consciousness. 
*PRINGLE-PaTTison, A. Seth, The Idea of God in the Light of 
Recent Philosophy. 
*RASHDALL, Hastings, Philosophy and Religion. The Theory of 
Good and Evil. 
Rogers, Arthur K., The Religious Conception of the World. 
*Royce, Josiah, The Conception of God. The Problem of Chris- 
tranity. 
SABATIER, Auguste, Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion. 
STARBUCK, Edwin Diller, Psychology of Religion. 
SoLovyor, Vladimir, The Justification of the Good. 
THOULESS, Robert H., An Introduction to the Psychology of 
Religion. 
TUCKWELL, J. H., Religion and Reality. 
*Wepss, Clement C. J.. God and Personality. Divine Personality 
and Human Life. 
*WricHt, William Kelley, A Student’s Philosophy of Religion 
(a good handbook). 


Il. CoMPARATIVE RELIGION AND THE History or RELIGION 


Barton, George A., The Religions of the World. 

*FRAZER, James G., The Golden Bough (now available in con- 
densed form in one volume). 

*Gtover, T. R., Progress in Religion to the Christian Era. 

*Hospuouse, Leonard T., Morals in Evolution. 

*Hopxins, Edward Washburn, The History of Religion. Origin 
and Evolution of Religion. 

JEVoNS, Frank Byron, Introduction to the History of Religion. 

Lane, Andrew, Magic and Religion. | 





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BIBLIOGRAPHY 365 


*Marert, Robert R., The Threshold of Religion. 

*MoorE, George Foot, History of Religions. The Birth and 
Growth of Religion. 

ScCHLEITER, Frederic, Religion and Culture. 

TIBLE, C. P., Elements of the Science of Religion. 

Toy, Crawford Howell, Introduction to the History of Religions. 

Tytor, Edward B., Primitive Culture. 


III. Works on Systematic PuiLosopHy, ESPECIALLY BEARING 
ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 


ALEXANDER, Samuel, Space, Time and Deity. 

*BrrGeson, Henri, Creative Evolution. Mind-Energy. 

*BrADLEY, Frederick Herbert, Appearance and Reality. Essays 
on Truth and Reality (the most brilliant exposition of 
“Absolute Idealism”). 

*BosanQuet, Bernard, The Principle of Individuality and Value. 
The Value and Destiny of the Individual (the best balanced 
account of “Absolute Idealism’’). 

Carr, H. Wildon, A Theory of Monads. 

*HUCKEN, Rudolf, Life’s Basis and Life’s Ideal. 

GENTILE, Giovanni, The Theory of Mind as Pure Act. 

*Hopnouse, Leonard T., Development and Purpose. Mind in 
Evolution. 

Howison, George Holmes, The Limits of Evolution. 

*JamES, William, Pragmatism. A Pluralistic Universe. The 
Will to Believe. 

Larirp, John, Problems of the Self. A Study in Realism. 

LeiaHtTon, Joseph A., Man and the Cosmos (a comprehensive 
treatise on metaphysics). 

McTaacart, James M. E., Some Dogmas of Religion. Studies 
in Hegelian Cosmology. 

MoraGan, Conway Lloyd, Emergent Evolution. 

*Royce, Josiah, The World and the Individual. 

SANTAYANA, George, The Life of Reason. Scepticism and 
Animal Faith. 

*ScHILLER, Frederick Canning Scott, Humanism. Studies in 
Humanism: Riddles of the Sphinx. 

*SorLey, William R., Moral Values and the Idea of God. 

Ten Brooke, James, The Moral Life and Religion. 
Varisco, B., The Great Problems. 
“Warp, James, The Realm of Ends. 


366 BIBLIOGRAPHY 


IV. On Mysticism 


*Bouriter, Dom Cuthbert, Mysticism in the West. 

GRANGER, Frank, The Soul of a Christian. 

*HuceL, Frederick von, The Mystical Element im Religion. 
Essays and Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. 

*Ince, W. R., Christian Mysticism. Faith and Its Psychology. 
Outspoken Essays. The Philosophy of Plotinus. 

*Jones, Rufus M., Studies in Mystical Religion. 

*UNDERHILL, Evelyn, Mysticism. The Mystic Way. 


V. On EvouutTion AND NATURAL SCIENCE 


*Brereson, Henri, Creative Evolution. 
Herpert, S., First Principles of Evolution. 
*HALDANE, John S., Mechanism, Life and Personality. 
HENvDERSON, Lawrence J., The Fitness of the Environment. The 
Order of Nature. 
*HosHovuse, Leonard T., Development and Purpose. 
Morean, Conway Lloyd, Emergent Evolution. 
Ritter, William E., The Unity of the Organism. 
*THomson, J. Arthur, The System of Animate Nature. 
Unwin, Ernest E., Religion and Biology. 


VI. On tHe PROBLEMS oF EVIL AND FREEDOM 


The General Treatises under I and III. 
*JAmES, William, “The Dilemma of Determinism,” in The Will 
to Believe. 

*EVERETT, Walter Goodnow, Moral Values (Chapters XII, XIII). 
PAULSEN, Frederic, System of Ethics. 
*RASHDALL, Hastings, Theory of Good and Evil. 
*Royrcr, Josiah, Studies in Good and Evil. 

SCHILLER, F. C. 8., Studies in Humanism. 
*SeTH, James, A Study of Ethical Principles. 


VII. PRAYER 


Cor, George Albert, The Spiritual Life. The Religion of a 
Mature Mind. 

CurTten, George Barton, Psychological Phenomena of Chris- 
tianity. 





BIBLIOGRAPHY 367 


*Fospick, H. E., The Meaning of Prayer. 

*Jamers, William, “The Energies of Men,” in Memories and 
Studies. 

*McComp, Samuel, Prayer: What It Is and What It Does. 


VIII. On Bopy anp Minp 


*Brrason, Henri, Matter and Memory. 

LricgHTon, J. A., Man and the Cosmos (Chapters XX-X XVII). 
Lorn, Jacques, The Organism as a Whole. 

*McDovuaatL, William, Body and Mind. 

*PrattT, James B., Matter and Spirit. 

Warson, John B., Behavior, A Textbook of Psychology. 


IX. ON ImMorRTALITY 


Brown, William Adams, The Christian Hope. 

Dickinson, G. Lowes, Is Immortality Desirable? 
*Frecuner, G. T., Life After Death. 

Fiske, John, Life Everlasting. 

*JameEs, William, Human Immortality. 

McComs, Samuel, On Immortality. 

*Myers, Frederic W. H., Human Personality and Its Survival of 
Bodily Death. 

MUNSTERBERG, Hugo, The Hternal Life. 
*PrINGLE-PaTrison, A. Seth, The Idea of Mortality. 
*Royce, Josiah, The Conception of Immortality. 

STREETER, B. H., and Others, Immortality. 

Simpson, J. Y., Man and the Attainment of Immortality. 


X. ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY 


*Bacon, Benjamin Wisner, The Making of the New Testament. 
The Beginnings of Gospel Story. 
*BurkiTt, F. C., The Gospel History and Its Transmission. 
*Case, Shirley Jackson, The Evolution of Harly Christianity. 
The Historicity of Jesus. Social Origins of Christianity. 
“CHARLES, R. H., Eschatology, Hebrew, Jewish and Christian. 
*DosscHuTz, Ernst von, Christian Life in the Primitive Church. 
*Douaat, Lily, and Emmett, C. W., The Lord of Thought. 
Du Boss, W. P., The Gospel in the Gospels. 
DucHEsneE, Louis, The Early History of the Church. 


368 BIBLIOGRAPHY 


GARDNER, Percy, The Growth of Christianity. 
“Guover, T. R., The Conflict of Religions Within the Roman 
Empire. 
GoopsPEED, E. J., The Jesus of History. The Story of the New 
Testament. 
Haut, G. Stanley, Jesus the Christ in the Light of Psychology. 
*Harnack, Adolf, What is Christianity? The Mission and Ea- 
pansion of the Christian Church. History of Dogma. 
“Henry, Francis A., Jesus and the Christian Religion. 
Kennepy, H. A., St. Pdul and the Mystery Religions. 
“LAKE, Kirsopp, and Jackson, F. J. Foakes, The Beginnings of 
Christianity. 
“LAKE, Kirsopp, Landmarks in the Early History of Christianity. 
Lorsy, Alfred, The Gospel and the Church. 
*“McGirrert, Arthur C., The Apostolic Age. The Early Christian 
Idea of God. 
*Morrart, James, Introduction to the New Testament. The The- 
ology of the Gospels. 
Peake, Arthur S., A Critical Introduction to the New Testament. 
SANDAY, W., Outlines of the Life of Christ. 
*Scorr, Ernest F., The Fourth Gospel. The Kingdom and the 
Messiah. 
*Scumipt, Nathaniel, The Prophet of Nazareth. 
*SCHWEITZER, Albert, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. 
SmirH, William B., Hcece Deus. 
*“WERNLE, Paul, The Beginnings of Christianity. 


XI. THe History or CHRISTIAN THOUGHT 


Histories of Philosophy by *Harold Hoffding, Arthur K. 
Rogers, *Frank Thilly, W. Windelband, and Alfred 
Weber. 

*AuLEN, Alexander, V. G., The Continuity of Christian Thought. 
Bartuett, J. V., and Cartyier, A. J., Christianity in History. 
BETHUNE-BAKER, J. F., An Introduction to the Early History 

of Christian Doctrine. 

*Biaa, Charles, Christian Platonists of Alexandria. 

*KUCKEN, R., The Problem of Human Life. 

“FISHER, George P., History of Christian Doctrine. 

GwATKIN, H. M., The Knowledge of God. 

“HARNACK, Adolf, Outlines of the History of Dogma. 





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BIBLIOGRAPHY 369 


*Hippen, J. G., The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. 
Inaz, W. R., Personal Idealism and Mysticism. 
LAGARDE, André, The Latin Church in the Middle Ages. 
Leckxy, W. E. H., History of European Morals. History of 
England in the Highteenth Century. 
*McGirrmrt, A. C., The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas. Prot- 
estant Thought before Kant. 
Mackin osu, H. R., The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ. 
Newman, John Henry, The Development of Christian Doctrine. 
*Moorsz, Edward Caldwell, Protestant Thought since Kant. 
Putian, Leighton, Religion Since the Reformation. 
Raney, Robert, The Ancient Catholic Church. 
*TROELTSCH, Ernest, Christian Thought. 
“Waiter, Andrew D., The Warfare of Science with Theology. 
Workman, H, B., Christian Thought to the Reformation. 


XII. Tue Eruics or Jesus 


ALEXANDER, Archibald B. D., Christian Ethics. 

*Euiuwoop, Charles A., The Reconstruction of Religion. 

Kine, Henry Churchill, The Ethics of Jesus. 

LEIGHTON, J. A., Jesus Christ and the Civilization of To-Day 
(out of print). 

*MarTuews, Shailer, The Social Teachings of Jesus. The Gospel 
and the Modern Man. 

*PAULSEN, Frederick, A System of Ethics. 

Prazsopy, Frances G., Jesus Christ and the Social Question. 
*RASHDALL, Hastings, The Theory of Good and Evil. 
*RAUSCHENBUSCH, Walter, Christianity and the Social Crisis. A 

Theology for the Social Gospel. Christianizing the Social 
Order. 
SrtH, James, Ethical Principles. 


XIII. Soctan Eruics anp SoctaL PHILOSOPHY 


*CARPENTER, Niles, Guild Socialism. 
*Coxrz, G. D. H., The World of Labor. 
Dewey and Torts, Ethics. 
Eiiwoop, C. A., The Reconstruction of Religion. Christianity 
and Social Science. 
“HETHERINGTON and MuIRHEAD, Social Purpose. 


370 BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Hosnovuss, Leonard T., Hlements of Social Justice. 

*MacDonatp, J. Ramsay, Socialism. 

MaclIver, R. M., Community. 

MacKenziz, John Stuart, Outlines of Social Philosophy. 

*Meckuin, John M., Introduction to Social Ethics. 

*RuSSELL, Bertrand, Principles of Social Reconstruction. Pro- 
posed Roads to Freedom. 

RvusseEuu, Bertrand and Dora, The Prospects of Industrial Civ- 
ilization. 

*WALLAS, Graham, The Great Society. Our Social Heritage. 
*Wess, Sidney and Beatrice, A Constitution for the Socialist 
Commonwealth. The Decay of Capitalist Civilization. 

WILLIAMS, James Mickel, Principles of Social Psychology. 


XIV. Soctatn Proaress 


*Bury, J. B., The Idea of Progress. 
Crozier, J. Beattie, Civilization and Progress. 
Dickinson, G. Lowes, Justice and Liberty. 
*HosHouse, L. T., Morals in Evolution. Social Evolution and 
Political Theory. Social Development. 
“Incn, W. R., “The Idea of Progress,” in Outspoken Hssays 
(Volume IT). 
LrigHton, Joseph A., The Field of Philosophy (Introduction 
and Chapters XX VI-XXVIII). 
*Marvin, F. S., The Living Past. 
Oapurn, Wiliam F., Social Change. 
SHAFER, Robert, Science and Progress. 
SuHaAw, G. Bernard, Prefaces to Three Plays for Puritans, Man 
and Superman, and Back to Methusaleh. 
Topp, Arthur James, Theories of Social Progress. 
Urwick, E. J., A Philosophy of Social Progress. 
Warp, Lester F., Dynamic Sociology. Applied Sociology. 
WELLS, H. G., A Modern Utopia. Mankind in the Making. Men 
Like Gods. New Worlds for Old. Outline of History, ete. 


XV. RELIGION AND THE STATE 


Fiaars, J. N., Churches in the Modern State. 

Foutert, M. P., The New State. 

*Incr, W. R., “The State Visible and Invisible,” in Outspoken 
Essays (Volume IT). 





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BIBLIOGRAPHY 371 


Lasxi, H. J., Authority in the Modern State. Studies in the 
Problem of Sovereignty. 


XVI. ON THE HEBREW RELIGION 


*BuppE, Karl, The Religion of Israel to the Exile. 

*HosnHouse, L. T., Morals in Evolution (Part II, Chapter IX). 

Kouuer, Kaufman, Jewish Theology. 

MonTerFiore, C. G., Lectures on the Origin and Growth of the 
Hebrew Religion. 

SCHECHTER, Solomon, Studies in Judaism. 

*"SmirtH, Henry Preserved, The Religion of Israel. 

SmitH, W. Robertson, The Religion of the Semites. 


XVII. On InprAN RELIGIONS 


Das Gupra, 8. A History of Indian Philosophy. 

*DEuSSEN, Paul, The Philosophy of the Upanishads. The System 
of the Vedanta. Outline of the Vedanta System. 

FAaRQuAHER, J. N., The Crown of India. 

“Hopkins, E. W., The Religions of India. 

*Keriru, A. Berriedale, Buddhist Philosophy. 

McGovern, W. M., Manual of Buddhist Philosophy. 

Monier, Williams, Brahamism and Hinduism. 

*NirosE, I. O., Bushido. 

"Pratt, J. B., India and its Faiths. 

*"Ruys, Davids, T. W., Indian Buddhism. 


XVIII. ON GREEK AND Roman ReEuicious THouveutT 


*ARNOLD, E. V., Roman Stoicism. 

*Biac, Charles, Neo-Platonism. 

*Carrp, Edward, The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Phi- 
losophers. 

*Cumont, F., The Mysteries of Mithra. The Oriental Religions 
in Roman Paganism. 

Dewey and Turrs, Hthics (Chapter VII). 

*Dickinson, G. Lowes, The Greek View of Life. 

*EuUCKEN, R., The Problem of Human Life. 

*FAIRBANKS, Arthur, A Handbook of Greek Religion. 

Farnewu, L. R., The Higher Aspects of Greek Religion. The 
Cults of the Greek States. 


372 BIBLIOGRAPHY 


“Fow ier, W. Warde, The Religious Experience of the Roman 
People. 
“Grover, T. R., The Conflict of Religions Within the Roman 
Empire. 
GompeERz, Theodore, Greek Thinkers. 
Harrison, Jane Ellen, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek 
Religion. 
Hicks, R. D., Stoics and Epicureans. 
*Inaze, W. R., The Philosophy of Plotinus. 
“Moors, C. H., The Religious Thought of the Greeks. 
Mors, Paul Elmer, The Religion of Plato. Hellenistic Philiso- 
phies. 
*Patrr, Walter, Marius the Epicurean. 
“PAULSEN, Frederick, A System of Ethics (Part I, Chapters I, 
IIT). 
WHITTAKER, Thomas, The Neo-Platonists. 
WINDELBAND, Wilhelm, A History of Philosophy. A History of 
Ancient Philosophy. 
ZELLER, Eduard, A History of Greek Philosophy. 


XIX. ON CHINESE RELIGION AND ETHICS 


Carus, Paul, The Canon of Reason and Virtue (Lao-Tse’s Tao 
Teh King). 


Dawson, Miles Menander, The Ethics of Confucius. 

De Groot, J. J. M., Religion in China. The Religion of the 
Chinese. 

Doveuas, R. K., Confucianism and Taoism. 

Gites, H. A., Confucianism. 

Henke, F. G., The Philosophy of Wang Yang-Ming. 

Lecce, James, The Chinese Classics. 

PARKER, E. H., Studies in Chinese Religion. 

On all Oriental Religion: The Sacred Books of the East. 


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